


Because We're Here

by alreadybroken (lifeofsnark)



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Alfie is a slightly manic teddy bear, Cunnilingus, Eventual Smut, F/M, Kissing, Lizzie is a VAD nurse, Lizzie needs a hug, Mentions of sex work, Multi, ONLY EMOTIONS, Oral Sex, Polyamory, Slow Burn, There is no plot, Threesome - F/M/M, WWI AU, canon divergent prequel, canon levels of war and blood, got that triple S action, i love them your honor, let's go to war kids!, p in v, pre-canon Tommy is still kind of a dick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:21:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23809069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lifeofsnark/pseuds/alreadybroken
Summary: WWI AU.When Lizzie is shipped across the Channel to nurse wounded soldiers in France, there's nothing holding her back. Her mother is gone, her job at the BSA is gone, and every trick chips away at a little more of her dignity. In the VAD she'll have a chance to earn her place; to find the belonging she seeks- except she doesn't find it in the field hospitals of the Western Front. She finds it hidden in the shadows with a furious sergeant-major and a blustery artillery captain.
Relationships: Alfie Solomons/Lizzie Stark, Tommy Shelby/Alfie Solomons, Tommy Shelby/Alfie Solomons/Lizzie Stark, Tommy Shelby/Lizzie Stark
Comments: 136
Kudos: 183





	1. Chapter 1

We’re here  
Because  
We’re here  
Because  
We’re here  
Because we’re here.  
_ \--Unattributed Soldiers’ Song _

* * *

**Last days of June, 1916**  
**Near Étaples, France.**

There are very few things in this life to which people can’t adapt. 

Lizzie would know. 

She’d grown used to the smell of sick and dying bodies almost immediately. She noticed it- of course she did- but it didn’t turn her stomach any more. She could soldier on, emptying bedpans and washing sweaty limbs and delivering meals. Bodies were bodies. Everyone had one. 

She’d already grown used to sleeplessness. That was a skill she had that the posher Volunteer Aid Detachment nurses didn’t. She’d gone from school to the BSA to the dance hall. Sleep was a luxury she hadn’t been able to afford. 

Lizzie also got used to respect. She grew used to soldiers smiling at her when she went on her rounds, calling her, “Miss Stark,” and listening to her like she mattered. She stopped looking over her shoulder for people who had known her  _ before;  _ before the VAD and the sturdy blue uniform dress and the veneer of respectability that her white apron lent her. 

Lizzie grew used to thinking only of the present- of the broken bodies who needed her, of her reports and duties and thin little cot. She stopped trying to outrun her past, and that was when it found her. 

It was a mild, gentle summer evening when Lizzie walked across the barren scraps of French grass to the temporary hospital building. The sun was setting, and the air had already gone soft and blue with encroaching night. Shells were intermittently rumbling in the distance, but that, too, was something she’d grown used to. 

Matron Braxton was already waiting at the head of the ward, and Lizzie sped up a little, her sensible black shoes making no noise on the floor. She didn’t want to be the last one to the evening meeting, even though she knew there were still a few minutes left before the 7:50 muster. 

“Miss Stark,” said the Matron, nodding haughtily. 

“Matron Braxton, Miss Webb,” said Lizzie, nodding at one of the day nurses. Edith scurried over, and the four of them waited a few short moments for the other night-duty nurse to join them. 

“There’s been gas cases, today,” said the Matron. “Beds One through Eight. Use the 7% flush every hour, and be sure to write  _ neatly  _ on their charts.”

Lizzie and Helen nodded. 

“Only a few surgicals,” the Matron continued. “Most should rest peacefully until at least eleven. Send an orderly if you need me. Now bow your heads.”

Lizzie closed her eyes as the familiar prayer washed over her: “ _ God, give these men the strength to do what needs to be done, and give us the strength to heal them _ .” The words had been washed soft, the way a river rounds out stones, but they were pretty anyway. Hopeful words. 

The Matron left, taking the day-nurses with her, and Lizzie walked quietly to her side of the ward. She had the gas cases, and she unlocked the cabinet of medical supplies to grab a bottle of alkaline eye flush. It went onto her little rolling cart with clean cotton cloths, and then she walked down the warmly-lit aisle to Bed One. 

“Don’t jump,” Lizzie whispered, gently touching the boy’s shoulder to let him know she was near. “I just need to flush out your eyes.”

“Again?” he said, his accent thick and northern. 

“Again,” said Lizzie, quickly peeling back the cloth that had been resting over his swollen, reddened eyes. He shuddered as she flushed them, and then she was dabbing his cheeks dry, replacing the bandage, and moving onto the next bed. 

He was deeply asleep, and groggily asked if it was already morning. Lizzie told him no, that she was sorry, but she’d have to be back in an hour. He was asleep again before she’d wheeled the little cart away. 

It went that way for two more beds, and then she reached the first of the miners. He had chemical burns as well as affected eyes: all too often the gas would get inside their tunnels, travel up the gentle grade, and smoke out the diggers like so many wasps from the nest. And because it was a tunnel and a shaft, the poor men didn’t have anywhere else to go. 

She checked his dressings, rinsed his eyes, and noted it on his chart. The same with the next, and the one after, until she got to the final bed. The one with a shorter, wiry soldier. The chart that bore the name  _ Shelby,  _ a word whispered throughout Small Heath the way the faithful might invoke the name of their god. 

“Tommy?” Lizzie whispered, shocked. 

He stiffened, and his bandaged face turned towards her. “That’s me,” he said. 

Lizzie shook herself and went about her tasks. His hands had been burned, and they rested on a pillow over his lap. 

“Your hands first, I think,” she said quietly.

He shrugged. 

She checked to see if the burns were weeping, and was relieved to see they weren’t. She noted it down, and then grabbed the bottle of eye solution. “Lie back, please,” she said and he did, as stiffly as a man expecting torture. 

“You’re from Birmingham,” he said, his voice gas-roughened. “I can hear it.”

“Yes,” said Lizzie, knowing the game was up. “Small Heath, actually.”

Tommy held unnaturally still as she pulled off the bandage. “Do I know you?” he asked quietly. 

Lizzie shook her head before remembering her couldn’t see her, not with his eyes as bad off as they were. “No,” she said, irrigating his left eye and skillfully catching the solution that rolled down his sharp cheekbone. “I knew Ada, a little. She was a couple years ahead of me at the Board School.”

“What’s your name?” he asked imperiously, and yes- that was the Shelby way, wasn’t it? 

“Lizzie Stark,” she said, moving onto his other eye. He’d made Sergeant-Major. Probably that had only made him even more predisposed to snapping orders. 

“Dark hair,” he said slowly, like remembering was a chore. 

“Yes,” said Lizzie, surprised that he’d remembered. She and Ada had never been particularly close.

He shrugged his shoulders again, forcing himself back up into a sitting position as Lizzie rewound the bandages over his eye. “I’ll be back in an hour to do it again,” she warned him. “You should get some rest.”

“Lizzie-” his hand found her wrist easily, moving as fluidly as he would if he could see her. “Will I see again?”

Lizzie gently disengaged his fingers. The Matron insisted on propriety at all times on the ward: soldiers were called by rank, nurses were referred to by surname, and touching was limited to only what was required to help and heal. “Most do,” Lizzie said carefully. She’d seen men with worse burns heal completely. 

“You aren’t sure.”

“Nothing is sure,” said Lizzie, taking a few extra seconds to reorganize her little cart and fill out his chart. 

Tommy huffed a mirthless laugh. “Yeah.”

He didn’t need to say the last bit.  _ Nothing is sure but death. _

“I’ll be back,” said Lizzie, and continued on her rounds. 

It had been inevitable. That’s what she told herself as she checked bedpans and water jugs and medical charts. Someone was going to recognize her eventually. Birmingham was a big city, and so many of its men had gone to France to fight. It was good to get it out of the way like this, with a man who knew  _ of  _ her, but hadn’t really known her. 

An hour passed, and the sun was well and truly down. Oil lamps had been carefully lit, and now the hospital glowed gently, the same warm yellow as fireflies in the summer night. 

Lizzie was halfway through her second round with the gas victims when the door to the temporary hospital opened again. Lizzie straightened, as did Helen and the orderlies. Usually when casualties were coming a telegram was sent ahead, warning the St. John’s staff to have the operating theater ready. There hadn’t been a telegram, but then again- sometimes there wasn’t. War was both more and less organized than Lizzie expected it to be. 

The man who came through the door wasn’t particularly tall. He looked like he’d be of a height with Lizzie, but even from across the ward he was intimidating. It was the way he moved, like he’d never known fear in his life. Shadows from the lamps caught in his deep-set eyes, but his aura of violence was slightly broken by the little tuft of cowlick-ruffled hair that stuck up when he removed his flat officer’s cap.

Helen and the orderlies returned to their tasks, but Lizzie watched for a few seconds more. The officer scanned the ward and then started heading her way. “Miss?”

Lizzie carefully rebandaged the miner’s eyes. “Yes, Captain?”

“Looking for a mate. Shelby. Got some mail for him.” He waved a few crinkled envelopes at her. 

Lizzie swallowed hard. “Last bed in the row.”

“Thank you,” he said, bobbing his head even as he turned towards Tommy’s bed. 

Lizzie tried not to eavesdrop as she tended to her next few patients. She tried, but in some ways she couldn’t help it: there was no privacy in the hospital ward, and sounds carried. 

“Tommy, mate,” said the captain, dropping onto the empty cot by Tommy’s bed. “Got some mail for you.”

Tommy huffed a mirthless laugh. 

“Right,” said Tommy’s captain, and paper crinkled. “No, don’t be an ungrateful cunt. What, you writing naughties to some girl? Then stop. See, this first letter’s from your sister.”

Lizzie almost got eye rinse up some poor lad’s nose, she was listening so hard. 

“Dear Tommy- yes, you are a dear, aren’t you?” the captain teased. 

“Alfie,” said Tommy, sounding tired and long-suffering. 

“Sorry, sorry,” said Alfie. “Right, then. “Dear Tommy. Polly’s gone round the bend again. I heard about it from Scudboat when I went to the office. According to Scudboat, some man started threatening her, not wanting to pay up, and she put a twenty centimetre hatpin right through his cheek. Squealed like a stuck pig, too. I thought about keeping hatpins on me, but I look fucking awful in those heavy felted things Polly wears. Might still look for some kind of holder I could put down my garter. Will update if I find one.

Last time I wrote I told you ‘bout how Howard Hendricks fell into his own privy. This week the most absurd thing I saw was a VAD nurse faint at the sight of her own blood. Went up to the courthouse to take a course on nursing, and the poor teacher went and passed out right at the front of the room when she cut her own fingers with those little bandage scissors. Not sure how much medical help she could give the soldiers, but she’d be great entertainment. 

I hope you’re well and not getting into much trouble. I asked Polly to read leaves for you, but she said it’d be a jinx. Lots of love, and don’t you dare die on me. Same to Arthur and John. Love, Ada.”

It had been odd to hear Ada’s words in a heavy cockney accent, but it was still so clearly  _ her.  _ Lizzie was abruptly homesick: homesick for England, for the right accent, for foggy mornings and the smell of coal on the wind. 

“Your fucking family, mate,” said Alfie. “We make it back to England, I’ll expect to meet ‘em. Hatpin in the cheek, good fucking lord.”

“She’s always been like that, Ada has,” said Tommy, his hands fidgeting with the blanket over his lap. “Used to tag around after us boys. Chased rats with a revolver.”

“Whole lot of you are mad, then,” said Alfie. “I’ve already met your fucking brothers. Primordial, they are.”

“Excuse me,” Lizzie said quietly, stepping between Tommy’s captain and the head of Tommy’s cot. “I have to rinse his eyes.”

She felt Alfie’s gaze on her while she worked, and startled when he abruptly asked, “Are you Jewish?”

Tommy sighed, and Lizzie carefully rewound his bandage again. “No,” she said. 

“She’s Catholic, like me,” said Tommy. “Leave her alone.”

Alfie squinted at her, his grey eyes taking on a greenish hue in proximity to his uniform. “You look Jewish,” he said. 

Lizzie didn’t know if that was supposed to be a compliment or not. She’d never had a problem with the small Jewish community in Birmingham. It seemed to her like they had just as many troubles as everyone else. 

“So, when he said you’re Catholic like him- does that mean you, right, you only believe in a god for the sole purpose of blaming Him for the bad that happens in your life? Or that you’re actually a fucking papist?”

Lizzie blinked. Before she could answer Tommy spoke for her. “Stop fucking with her. She has things to do.”

“Fuck off, Tom,” said Alfie, his gaze still focused on Lizzie. “So you’re not Jewish- would you like to be?”

Lizzie laughed, charmed despite herself. Sometimes the nursing staff were the first women the soldiers had seen in months. Edith had already received four teasing proposals, and Lizzie had two under her belt. 

“I don’t think it works like that, Captain,” she said, brushing against him as she walked back to the aisle. 

“It works however I want it to work,” said Alfie, a sneaky dimple winking in his cheek. 

“Fuck off man, c’mon,” said Tommy. “She’s just a kid. Went to school with Ada.”

Those grey eyes sharpened with intrigue. “Small fucking war, then, isn’t it?” he said. 

Lizzie ignored that. “You’ll have to leave soon,” she said quietly. “Visiting hours are already over.”

“I just got a couple more letters for my lad here,” said Alfie, holding up the grubby envelopes. “I promise to behave meself.”

Tommy snorted, and Lizzie nodded. “Alright then,” she said. “But be quick about it.”

Lizzie could hear the soft rumble of Alfie’s voice as she filled out paperwork at the little nurses’ station. She couldn’t make out any individual words, just the low patter of conversation. Soon enough it was time for another round of eye treatments, and Lizzie started down the line again. 

“You really have to go, Captain,” she said when she reached Tommy’s bed. “It’s late.”

Alfie was still sitting on the edge of the empty cot with his elbows braced on his knees. It made his shoulders look impossible wide, with one of Tommy’s letters dangling from his fingers. 

“Just reading to him.”

“More like telling bedtime stories,” said Lizzie, looking at the way Tommy’s chest slowly rose and fell under the thin hospital blankets. 

Alfie shrugged. “Worked, didn’t it?”

“I have to wake him up again,” said Lizzie, scooting past Alfie.

“You sure you have to? Seems a fucking shame. He doesn’t sleep much.”

“I don’t think anyone does,” said Lizzie quietly as another shell wailed in the distance.

“What’s your name?” Alfie asked abruptly, pushing to his feet. 

“Lizzie Stark,” she replied. 

“Alfred Solomons,” he said, sticking out a broad palm to shake hands. 

“Nice to meet you, Captain Solomons,” said Lizzie. 

“You on duty tomorrow night?”

“Yes,” said Lizzie, wondering why it mattered. 

“Then I’ll see you tomorrow. Take good care of the lads.” For a moment he cast a large shadow on the wall, and then he was out the door and into the night. 

Tommy startled when Lizzie went to wake him. It broke her heart. 

~~~

Hours later, Tommy disappeared from his bed. He couldn’t have gone far- not blindfolded and barefoot- but patients weren’t supposed to be out of bed, let alone out of the ward. She and the orderlies could get in trouble for this; they were supposed to sedate patients who struggled or fought or tried to flee. 

He was outside the back door, leaning against the wall of the temporary hospital structure and smoking a cigarette. The end glowed an angry orange that reflected distant burst of light flickering along the horizon. The shelling was almost like a heartbeat, now: something that happened without conscious awareness; a rhythm so familiar it could be ignored, remote and repetitive and vital.

“You’re not supposed to be out here,” said Lizzie quietly. “Both of us could get into trouble.”

“We’re in France,” Tommy rasped. “Middle of a fucking war. Not sure how much more trouble we could get into.”

“They shoot deserters.”

He shrugged. “’m not deserting. I’m right here, having a smoke.”

Lizzie gave up. He was a Shelby, and neither god nor reason would sway him. Instead she patted down her own dress pockets, searching for the matches and cigarettes she’d tucked away. 

“It’s so fucking quiet in there,” he said on a puff of smoke. “People tiptoeing around, all fucking hushed. I got used to the noise.”

His tone was combative, but Lizzie could hear the confession underneath. “I miss the bells from St. Martins,” she said. “I miss the first shift at the BSA. Could hear the time buzzer; people walking by under the window.” It had been… a part of the rhythm of the city, like the pulse of Birmingham itself. Until France, Lizzie had never known anything different. 

The ghost of a smile hung on his lips for a moment. “You get used to it, don’t you. You don’t notice those things anymore, until suddenly they  _ aren’t  _ there. Then you miss ‘em. Can’t sleep on the line. Can’t fucking sleep here. Fuck.”

He dropped the butt of his cigarette, and seemed to remember just in time that he wasn’t wearing shoes. “Fuck,” he muttered again. 

“It’s not the noise that bothers me,” said Lizzie slowly, tilting her head back to look up the sky. The moon was round and nearly full, but not many of the stars were visible. There wasn’t much she could do for this man, but she could offer him this truth: “It’s the tent.”

Tommy snorted. 

“Not that, you arse,” she said, taking a slow drag on her cigarette. “It’s not the cold, not the cot. A tent can’t lock.” 

Tommy turned towards her, and for a short second Lizzie was thankful that his eyes were bandaged. She wasn’t sure she would be able to make this confession if he were watching her. “Just canvas between me and the whole Fourth Army.”

He nodded slowly, and made a low, thoughtful sound. 

“Now come on,” she said. “If we’re gone much longer, we’ll be brought up on charges.”

He let her take his arm and guide him back to bed. One of the orderlies looked suspicious, but Lizzie explained that Tommy had woken up disoriented,  _ and would not do it again.  _

She checked the other patients, and then grabbed the gas rinse again. Most of the men barely woke up, and she could see the difference in their eyes already. The alkaline solution was negating the acidic gas that had gone in early in the day; their scleras were whiter and their lashes less gummed. 

Tommy was still awake when she made it back to him. “You had a mum,” he said abruptly. 

“Everyone has a mum,” said Lizzie evenly, resisting the temptation to run her fingers through his dirty hair. 

“What happened to her?”

“She died,” said Lizzie shortly. “Right after the war broke out.”

Tommy was quiet. 

“How are Arthur and John?” Lizzie asked, drying Tommy’s freckled cheeks. They were incongruous with the rest of his face: all sharp angles and smooth planes. The freckles were almost boyish in contrast. 

“Fine,” said Tommy quietly. “Most of the pals battalions have been broken up. They’re together. I got promoted out.”

“I’m sorry,” said Lizzie, even though the words had lost all their meaning. It wasn’t her fault- she didn’t have anything to be sorry for- but she didn’t know what else to say. Thousands of years of English history, and the language still hadn’t come up with a better way to say, “I see your pain, and I wish you didn’t have to bear it.”

Tommy shook his head. 

Lizzie continued on with her rounds, hour after hour. Far away, shells fell. Men snored, and the occasional train rumbled by. It was indistinguishable from every other night she’d spent in France, and yet something was different: that night, Lizzie hummed. Every song she could think of, from hymns to waltzes to American blues. She hummed, and sometime around dawn, Tommy slept. 

~~~

When Captain Solomons came back the following night, Lizzie was ready for him. She’d nudged the empty cot slightly closer to Tommy’s, and caught him as he came in the door. “Tuck your hat and coat under the bed, hide your boots, and you can stay,” she said, her orders quiet and quick. “I’ll change the linens in the morning. Be out by dawn.”

He gave her a sharp look, and emotions passed though his grey eyes like storm clouds: suspicion, annoyance, thanks. 

“Alright,” he said. 

Lizzie nodded, and that was that. She told herself it was easier than humming all night long. 

(Later, when she caught a glimpse of Alfie’s big hand wrapped around Tom’s own, her heart twanged. It didn’t matter if she hummed every night for a week-  _ there _ was belonging. There was something good, in the midst of so much pain. Who was she to mess with it?)

* * *

Oh never will I forget you,   
My men that trusted me,   
More my sons than your fathers’,  
For they could only see  
The little helpless babies  
And the young men in their pride.  
They could not see you dying,  
And hold you when you died. 

Happy and young and gallant,   
They saw their first-born go,   
But not the strong limbs broken  
And the beautiful men brought low,   
The piteous writhing bodies,  
They screamed, “Don’t leave me, Sir,”  
For they were only your fathers  
But I was your officer.  
\--Excerpt from  _ In Memoriam…,  _ E. A. Mackintosh


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Previously on Because We’re Here:_  
>  Lizzie works as a Volunteer Aid Detachment nurse in a field hospital a few miles back from the Somme front lines. She re-meets Tommy when he comes in for treatment after being gassed. His company captain, Alfie Solomons, comes to bring Tommy his mail, and he flirts with Lizzie. After Alfie leaves, Tommy slips out the back to have a cigarette. He and Lizzie talk: Lizzie doesn’t sleep well because you can’t lock a tent, and Tommy can’t sleep without noise to drown out his whirring thoughts. After they go back inside, Lizzie hums and Tommy sleeps. The next night Captain Solomons returns, and Lizzie catches him holding Tommy’s hand.

I don’t want to be a soldier,  
I don’t want to go to war.  
I’d rather stay at home,  
Around the streets I’d roam,   
And live on the earnings of a well-paid whore.  
I don't want a bayonet up my asshole,   
I don’t want my bollocks shot away.  
I’d rather stay in England,   
In merry, merry England,   
And fuck my bleeding life away.

\--Unattributed Soldiers’ Song

* * *

**July, 1916**

**Near Étaples, France.**

On the first day of July, the shells stopped. The run rose, brilliant and bright, blissfully unaware of the scenes it was illuminating below. Lizzie spared it a lingering glance as she walked slowly back to her tent from the mess hall after her shift in the hospital. She was used to exhaustion; the aches and pains and the muzzy mind that came with them. It didn’t seem to matter how tired she was, though. Some animal sense hated sleeping during daylight hours, and struggled to relax when she could hear horses and cars and all manner of unknown men moving about outside. 

She stepped into the soft shadows of her tent and sat on the edge of her thin cot to toe off her shoes. Edith was on the dayshift, and her blankets had been neatly smoothed. As Lizzie unpinned her cap and unbuttoned her blouse, the earth rocked, and it sounded as though the sky had split open. The picture of Edith’s fiance fell off of her footlocker, and the cot underneath Lizzie creaked ominously. The sound was somehow worse; the sound of something Lizzie has never heard and hoped never to experience again. People were screaming outside, and she jammed her feet back into her shoes and ran out of the tent. 

A private was jogging by, holding his helmet to his head. “Sir- what happened?” Lizzie asked, scampering after him. 

He paused to let her catch up. “The mines, Miss,” he said. “Up at the lines. They blew ‘em, all nineteen of them. The battle is on.”

“Our mines?” she asked, a picture of Tommy’s face flashing through her mind. “Or the German’s?”

“Ours, Miss,” said the soldier, already jogging towards the telegraph office. 

“Thank you,” Lizzie called after him. Tommy had been back on the lines for a week, him and his Captain both. She hoped the tunnels had been cleared. That there weren’t men lying trapped in their early graves. 

As the camp erupted into action around her, Lizzie stumbled back into her tent and lay down fully clothed on her cot. It was expected to be an easy enough assault: the shells would rain down in front of the British troops as they walked slowly across the grassy fields of the Somme. The German trenches had been destroyed by days and days of constant artillery fire. Still- with any battle came wounded, and Lizzie would be needed later. 

For now, she’d sleep.

~~~

The first of the wounded men began to flood in that night. By the glow of headlights and lanterns it seemed like the line of men awaiting triage stretched far beyond the outskirts of the post. The hospital trains chuffed, ambulance trucks rumbled, and horses stamped as they pulled in wagon loads of wounded. 

Nearly every one had a slash of red paint across his uniform: haemorrhage risk. 

The floor of the surgery went red. The hospital train kept coming. 

Every clean bed in the hospital filled as the sun came up. 

Usually VAD nurses weren’t allowed to do the trickier bits of care. They were helpful bodies and immensely necessary to the smooth running of the hospital, but they weren’t professionals. Their medical training had lasted for weeks, not years. They were glorified assistants in pretty white aprons. 

Their aprons weren’t white that night. Their aprons wouldn’t be changed for days. 

By noon Lizzie had been assigned to the recovery unit, which stretched out of the doors and onto the open green beyond. Ambulances continued to arrive. 

Men stopped being individuals to her, and if she’d had any spare room to think, it might have shamed her. Usually it was easy to remember that each of these men were scared and in pain, that they had hopes and fears of their own. Today, they were bodies. They were masses of muscle and bone and tissue that had been rearranged by the hubris and warmongering of foolhardy men. 

She still looked for Tommy and Alfie’s faces. 

By the sunrise of July second, less than twenty-four hours since the Battle for the Somme had begun, St. James hospital could take no more soldiers. They were waiting on shipments of anaesthetic and bandages and antiseptic. All they received were more wounded. 

Lizzie helped the heavy male orderlies carry the stabilized, already treated soldiers out to the medical trains for transport back to England. In an ideal world the soldiers would have been given several days to rest and recuperate. 

(Lizzie knew the world had fallen far short of ‘ideal’ a long time ago.)

The sun set. The sun rose. And still bodies arrived. 

Edith fell asleep out in the sunshine, the sanguine splatters on her wrinkled apron catching the afternoon light. She had her back against the wall of the hospital, and even the harried Matron let her be. 

More wounded. A few of them had been left in the field for two days, now: so much of the Fourth Army had been mowed down that there had hardly been anyone left to retrieve them. 

“A walk across the field,” one soldier muttered as Lizzie perfunctorily checked his dressing. “Walk across the field. Didn’t make it four bloody meters.”

The wounded kept coming. 

Later, she would only distinctly remember one: a very thin blond man with a bullet lodged inside his left eye socket. He’d put his pistol in his mouth and botched the job. Two officers escorted him in and ordered the Matron to fix him up as best she could. They had to heal him quick, so the firing squad could finish the work he’d started. 

More wounded. 

At some point the human brain can’t process any more grief, or fear, or sickness, or regret. The lizard brain knows this: that sometimes the body isn’t safe, but the mind can’t carry on. That’s when the lizard brain takes over.

Lizzie became a pair of hands. Nothing more: no past or future, no worries or immediate needs. She was merely the hands that tied the tourniquet, the hands that poured the water, the hands that soothed and tended. The hands with blood soaked in deep under her nails, and tiny cracks from where they’d been roughly scrubbed so many times. 

More wounded. 

She slept in fits and snatches, the way a street cat eats: furtively, and while nobody was watching. She had to have slept, because she woke up with a cold mug of tea in front of her and the impression of the tabletop pressed into her cheek. 

More wounded. 

And then… the wave lulled. The medical train still ran, but it didn’t seem to always be coming down the temporary tracks like an ever-looming specter of iron-clad death. The men still needed tending, but support nurses and doctors and volunteers had turned out by then, enough to see to the bedpans and linens and simple tasks. Shells still fell. Lizzie didn’t notice. She’d pushed through the exhaustion to a strange, over-bright place where sensation was dulled but thoughts were sharp: she had soldiers to tend. She had a job to do. 

“Miss Stark,” said the Matron from behind her. “Finish with your patient, then it’s your tea break.”

“Yes, Matron,” said Lizzie, carefully checking the tension she’d placed on the compression bandage. Lizzie pushed off the now-trampled grass, brushed off her knees, and turned in the direction of the mess hall. Like the hospital it had been operating round-the-clock, providing tea and reheated, tinned stew to any messenger or doctor or soldier capable of staggering in. She’d have a cup of tea- fixed everything, a cup of tea- and then see to Johnson’s stitches, and…

She came-to flat on her back, with her feet propped up on something and a familiar, dirty, worried face looking down at her. 

“I don’t fink I look that fucking bad,” said a familiar voice. Lizzie blinked, and decided she must be dreaming. (Maybe angels  _ could  _ have cockney accents and three day beards.) 

“Nah, none of that. C’mon, Tom, let’s get her up.”

Broad hands scooped her up under the arms and braced her: two at her shoulders, two on her waist. The sun was setting, but the slight chill in the air was cut by the warmth radiating off of the men on each side of her. 

“Miss Stark, we meet again,” said Captain Solomons. “And can I ask when you last fucking slept?”

Tom’s hands shifted as he lined her up with him, one hand holding her hip to his, the other wrapped around her hand. She blinked at him, caught thinking that his eerily pale blue eyes looked a little bit like dawn; liked that washed-out liminal space when the color hadn’t seeped back into the world yet. 

“I know he’s pretty, love, but you can’t fall asleep in the middle of the street. Come on.”

They frog marched her slowly down the road, and their hips and shoulders rocked against her like boats crammed into the mooring. 

“Which tent is yours?” Tommy asked. 

It took a long time for his question to filter down to the conscious part of Lizzie’s brain. “Can’t,” she said, trying to force her spine to straighten, to take more of her weight. “Matron told me a tea break.”

“I’ll deal with that harpy,” said Alfie. “Tom, you got her?”

“I’ve got her,” he said, and then his hands were both on her waist again, and he was propping her up against the side of the mess hall. Lizzie squinted her eyes, scanning him up and down to see if he was hurt. He was holding his left shoulder strangely, but his uniform wasn’t soaked in blood and he was up and walking. That was more than could be said for most of the men. 

“Did you get hurt?” she asked, still squinting at him through half-open eyes. The late-afternoon sun just seemed so _ bright.  _

Tommy gave her a look and then dug in his pockets for a cigarette. “You smoke?” he asked. 

“When I can,” said Lizzie. (Her fingers shook so much that Tommy finally lit the cigarette himself, and then passed it to her.)

“Shrapnel to the back,” he said when they’d both taken in that burning, soothing first drag. “Twenty-five stitches. ‘M fine.”

“And Captain Solomons?” Lizzie asked, watching a runner jogging out of the telegram office. Watching the camp was a little like watching a picture down at the penny crush: it was all too-quick and too-much and far, far away. 

“He was back with the artillery,” said Tommy. “He’s fine.”

“I watched for you,” said Lizzie solemnly. “In the wounded. I didn’t want to see you come in.”

Tommy gave her a sharp look, but Lizzie didn’t have the energy or wherewithal to parse it. “You don’t need to do that,” he said on a puff of smoke.

Lizzie shrugged, which made her wobble. Tommy huffed a breath- amusement? annoyance?- and braced her shoulder with his, adding a hand looped loosely around her waist. “When’s the last time you slept?”

“I napped yesterday,” said Lizzie. She thought it was yesterday. She’d left the concept of time behind in England. Here the days blurred together even when the war was quieter. 

“Need more than that,” said Tommy, and Lizzie rolled her eyes and tilted her head so it lay against Tommy’s shoulder. She didn’t particularly care if anyone saw her consorting with a man, no matter how platonic it was. She was too tired to care: if she was sent home to England, she could sleep. It didn’t matter if she ended up living in Hyde Park- she’d finally be able to fucking sleep. 

“You’re one to talk,” Lizzie mumbled. “Couldn’t sleep unless I hummed for you.”

Tunelessly (and cruelly, but she didn’t care) Lizzie started humming. It was flat and strange and droning, and made Tommy stiffen up again. “Hey,” he said after a few minutes of tense silence. “Alfie’s waving for us.”

Lizzie allowed herself to be marched across the packed earth road to the front hospital entrance, where Alfie and the Matron were waiting for them. 

“Miss Stark,” said the Matron, and her voice was only half as starched as usual. “You are to take three days of bed rest. I’ll see to it that your meals are brought to your quarters. We will see you here Friday evening, 19:50 on the dot.”

Lizzie managed to make her head nod, and couldn’t help but smile back at Alfie, whose face had twisted up in amusement over the Matron’s shoulder. 

“Are you drunk, Miss Stark?” the Matron asked, her voice needle sharp. 

“No,” said Lizzie. “Nothing to drink over here, anyway.”

The Matron’s eyes narrowed, but she gave Lizzie one last nod. “To your quarters,” she ordered before swanning back into the ward. 

“Oughta send her out against the bloody huns,” Alfie muttered, falling into step against Lizzie’s other side. “Fucking Gerry’d come crying to us, asking ‘bout peace. Like sending Moses into the fucking Pharoah, right.”

Lizzie didn’t know what he was talking about. She didn’t have a fucking clue; she just let the words flow over her like a warm bath. 

“Lizzie!” That was Tommy’s voice, hard and annoyed. “I asked which fucking tent is yours.”

He cursed an awful lot, considering she was a lady. (Except she wasn’t a lady, but he didn’t have to know that. He also didn’t need to know that she liked to curse, too.)

“You’re over here with the men, love,” said Captain Solomons, tipping his face towards hers. “You have a good swear when you like. But we need to know which tent is yours, ‘cause the next bloke who finds you on your back in the street ain’t likely to be as concerned as we are, right?”

She must have said that out loud. Also, finally- finally- what he was asking for made sense. 

“Two rows back from the supply tent. And three… four over? It’s khaki,” she added helpfully. 

Tommy huffed out a breath and got them moving again, but Captain Solomons was chickling, high and amused. Lizzie decided she liked him more, even if he was from London. 

“We’ll get her close,” said Tommy. “Then she’ll recognize it.”

“Fucking relax, Tom. Nowhere we gotta be, and besides- you’ve got to be patient with the ladies.”

“Men are never patient,” Lizzie mumbled. “Three minutes and they’re off, wanting a sandwich with their tea.”

Alfie’s laughter rocked his whole body, sending happy tremors into Lizzie, too. “Are you sure you’re not Jewish? ‘Cause you fucking should be.”

“Oh,” said Lizzie. “That’s my tent.”  _ Home,  _ or at least what approximated it here in France. It was hers, and contained a flat, stationary surface where she could sleep in what passed as privacy. For now, it was perfect. 

“No no no,” said Alfie, catching Lizzie by the arm when she tried to fall face-first into her cot. 

Tommy was hovering at the tent flap, his face expressionless and arms crossed. “We got her here,” he said. “C’mon.”

Alfie turned Lizzie by the shoulders and nudged her onto the edge of the cot. Big, blunt fingers plucked the pins from her apron and drug her shoes from her feet. 

“Why?” Lizzie managed to ask as she fell onto her pillow. She wouldn’t have been able to open her eyes for anything: not money, not the king, not these two soldiers who’d helped her. 

“We’re mates,” said Alfie. “You look after my lads, we’ll look after you.  _ Gey shlofn _ , Lizbet.” If he added anything else, Lizzie didn’t hear it. She was already asleep.

~~~

She didn’t see Captain Solomon’s again until her hearing. 

Lizzie woke up on the third day of her leave feeling mostly like her old self- but only if that Lizzie was also sweaty and filthy and more hungry than she’d been in her life. She spent the afternoon washing, seeing to her laundry, and drinking cup after cup of tea in the mess. It didn’t matter that it was July, and hotter than France had any right to be. She was thirsty and finally back on an even keel. 

The first soldier found her as she walked through the evening shadows on the way back to her tent. She wanted to tidy up, and then she needed to put on her apron and cap and report to the hospital. 

“You the Brummie nurse?” he asked, his own accent twanging with South London. 

“Yes,” said Lizzie. “That’s me.”

The soldier walked up to her, tall and lean and with a gleam in his cornflower blue eyes. “Heard you, you know. Took in a bit of cash on the side.”

Lizzie’s stomach dropped, and a chill scraped down her spine. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, but something gleamed in the corporal's eyes. She’d given it away. 

“Bloke in my unit’s from Birmingham. Said that he woke up in hospital and thought he’d gone home or back to heaven, ‘cause his neighborhood whore was bent over him, cutting off his shirt.”

Lizzie tried to step around him, but he shifted, pressing closer. “I’ll pay,” he said. “And I won’t have to tell anyone I know. They only let good girls in the VAD, right? Only nice, proper, rich girls.”

“No requirement,” said Lizzie cooly. She was used to this; could feel her old instincts rising back to the surface. “Just a preference. And I’d prefer that you move.”

“I’ll tell. You’ll be drummed out in shame.”

“You’ll tell,” Lizzie scoffed, shaken to her absolutely core. “You sound like a child.” Finally she pushed past him, and then she was shaking in her tent. Fuck him, he was right: the VAD contract said they could send her home for any unbecoming behaviour. (Fuck her: she should have done it.) 

She’d grown so used to respect. 

Lizzie clenched her fists in her hair and tilted her face back, taking a few slow breaths. 

She had three options. One- find the man, suck him off, and hate herself. Two- quit her position, go back to England, and hope one of the munitions factories would take her on. They had more open positions now than when she’d turned to whoring. So many men had been called up. 

(So many men had died.)

Her third option was to splash some water on her face, put on her apron, and go to work. 

With her jaw set and her spine straight, Lizzie went. 

~~~

The Matron was waiting for her at the edge of the hospital, and her face looked like the judgement of god; like every last bloody horseman of the Revelation rolled into one. 

“Miss Stark,” she said, reaching out to grab Lizzie’s arm like a crab pinscher. “Come with me.” 

Lizzie was walked across the road to the command offices, and with each step bile began to burn in her belly. 

“What’s going on?” she asked, impressing herself with how even her voice was. 

The Matron ignored her. They brushed past the NCO’s desk in the small entry area and pushed on into the planning area beyond. Maps were tacked to the rough-hewn walls, a picture of King George hung next to a small window, and the center of the space was dominated by a wide desk, piled high with pens and notebooks and scattered reports.

The Third Battalion colonel was leaning back in his seat holding a cigar, which trailed smoke up to the stained and yellowed ceiling. A major and corporal were seated at the table as well, each looking tired and rumpled. 

“Matron Braxton,” said the Colonel. “Is this entirely necessary?”

“I have had a credible accusation,” snapped Matron Braxton. “And as commanding officer of this post, you must hear it.”

“Where is the accuser?” asked the Major, with clear disinterest. 

“Back on the lines,” said the Matron. “But I got his name and unit.”

“She has the right to face her accuser,” said the Major, shuffling some papers. 

“This isn’t a court marshall,” said the Matron. “She isn’t Regular Army. Miss Stark is VAD, and her contract can be terminated at any time with the consensus of the nursing staff- myself- and her commanding officer.”

“What is it I’m s’posed to have done?” Lizzie asked, her accent dropping at least one social class as the horror of her situation finally registered. She’d be drummed out of the VAD and sent back to England where nobody and nothing waited for her. 

“Three different men came to me today,” said the Matron, drawing herself up to her full height. “And told me that one of my nurses used to whore in Birmingham.”

The corporal managed to look interested. The colonel just looked tired. 

“Is there any reason to believe the charges?” he asked, barely flicking a glance in Lizzie’s direction. “Has she been seen fraternizing with any of the men?” 

“Not yet,” said the Matron stoutly. “But three accounts, Colonel. Why would the men lie?” 

_ Because I wouldn’t suck ‘em off,  _ Lizzie thought tiredly. Because men fucked women over, one way or another. It was the way the world worked. 

“I just need your signature to send her home,” said the Matron, nudging a paper closer to the colonel. 

Before he could reply, the door to the office blew open, and someone new trooped inside. 

“Colonel Rust, Major Haymith.” Captain Solomons saluted, and then came to stand in the place next to Lizzie. 

“Is everything alright, Solomons?” Colonel Rust asked. 

“Fine, sir,” said Captain Solomons. “I came by the ward to bring letters to some of my men, and the other nurse informed me that Miss Stark was being drummed out.”

“And you are here to…” the colonel asked, raising one busy eyebrow. 

“With all due respect sir, I don’t see any reason to send Miss Stark home,” he said. “She’s looked after a dozen of my men, and they’ve all been in better spirits for it.”

Lizzie finally pushed through the shock that Captain Solomons was  _ here,  _ and speaking in her defense, to notice that his accent was very nearly gone. He was like her, then. Able to hide it if he needed to, but too much of the street to let his accent go for good.

The major smirked. “That does seem to fit with the charges, Captain.”

Alfie sent the major a  _ look.  _ “Begging your pardon sirs, but I don’t think we can afford to send a trained nurse home for something she might’ve done in her past. We’ve seen fifty thousand wounded this week, sir-”

_ So many,  _ Lizzie thought, staggered by the number. Fifty thousand British men bleeding into the mud of France.

“-and we need all the medical staff we can get.”

Colonel Rust looked from Captain Solomons to the Matron. “Ma’am, has she ever behaved in a manner unbecoming the British Army?”

Lizzie barely stopped herself from scoffing. The lowest drunk could hardly behave in a manner unbecoming the British fucking army. These were normal men sent into an impossible place and asked to accomplish an impossible task. The toffs should be happy that the men were here at all- it had sure occurred to Lizzie that there were more working men than there were officers to command them. What the fuck could this colonel do if every last Tom, Jack, and Harry decided to pack on home?

The matron didn’t answer. 

“Matron Braxton,” said the colonel, a little more sharply than before. “I’d like to see Miss Stark’s service record.”

With a glower at Captain Solomons, the matron passed over a thin folder. 

The colonel flipped through it. “High marks during training. High rate of efficiency on the floor. Last month you recommended her for another year of her tour abroad. It seems as though she’s an exemplary employee.”

Lizzie glanced at the floor. She wasn’t sure anyone had said that many nice things about her before. She’d definitely never had that much praise from someone who wasn’t trying to fuck her. It was nice, and a little uncomfortable, like borrowing someone else’s clothes. Even if they fit, you were never quite able to relax into them.

“She does her job, sir,” said Captain Solomons, pressing his advantage. “Remembers the men’s names, doesn’t scold.” He shot the Matron a pointed look. 

“I don’t see a reason to send this woman home, Matron,” said Colonel Rust. “But thank you for bringing the issue to my attention.”

The Matron shot a look at the colonel, at Lizzie, and then back again. “Your shift was already covered,” said the Matron, her words clipped like each took effort. “Return to your tent.”

The Matron left, and it felt like the barometric pressure in the room dropped by half. The major loosened his tie, Captain Solomons let an inch of flexibility back into his spine, and Lizzie took what felt like her first full breath all evening. 

Captain Solomons had spoken for her.  _ And the colonel had agreed.  _ Lizzie was reeling, her insides flipping back and forth. Is this what belonging felt like?

For the entirety of her fairly short life, Lizzie had known that she was… not expendable, maybe. But  _ replaceable.  _ Her father had left- maybe to start another family, or maybe to drink himself to death in peace. She hadn’t been sorry to see the man go, and to take his big fists with him.

Lizzie had left school to work, and the girls she’d run with had closed ranks, the way skin closes over a wound. When Lizzie’s mother had died, her mum’s friends had been quick to shake off their grief, and any responsibility they felt towards Lizzie. She’d been let go from the BSA, and someone had taken her place on the line before the shift was done. To men, a whore was a whore: cheap and interchangeable. And to god?

Lizzie wasn’t sure what god thought of her, if he even noticed her at all.

“I’m sorry about this, Miss Stark,” said Colonel Rust, breaking Lizzie out of the spiral of her thoughts. “If you’d like to put in for a duty transfer, I wouldn’t blame you.”

Lizzie blinked. “I- I didn’t know we were allowed to transfer,” she said. 

“Corporal, find the medical staff transfer form,” said the colonel. 

They waited in tense silence while the corporal rummaged through one of the crooked filing cabinets. 

“Have it back in the morning,” he said when he passed it to Lizzie. 

She took the paper and tucked it carefully into the breast pocket of her uniform dress. “Thank you,” she said, making eye contact with the colonel. “Thank you all.”

Colonel Rust waved them off, and Lizzie and Captain Solomons stepped out into the humid summer night. 

“Coffee?” he asked, gently steering Lizzie by her elbow. 

“I-”

“You’ve got the night off, right? Have coffee with me.” His cockney accent was back in full force.  _ ‘Ave coffee wiv me.  _

“Alright,” said Lizzie, following him into the mess hall. They filled tin mugs from the ever-present vat of lukewarm coffee and sat alone in a shadowy corner: Lizzie on one bench seat, and Captain Solomons on the other. 

“Thank you,” said Lizzie, running the tip of her index finger around the rim of her cup. “You didn’t have to- to come help me. Again.”

Alfie shrugged, his heavy shoulders rolling smoothly under his uniform coat. “You’re one of the company, see? Everyone knows about the nice Brummie nurse who works nights up at St. Johns.”

Lizzie looked away, watching the door to the mess hall without really seeing it. “Aren’t you gonna ask?” 

“Ask what?”

“You know.”

“Nah, I ain’t gonna ask. It doesn’t matter, does it? You’re here, and we’re here, and it matters fuck all what we did before, right? We aren’t those people anymore, none of us are. We’re fucking  _ here _ .”

Lizzie shrugged and ignored her coffee. “They reported me because I wouldn’t fuck some private.”

“Hmm,” said Alfie, low and thoughtful. 

“When I first got here,” said Lizzie quietly, tracing her fingers along the wood grain of the table, “I thought everyone knew, somehow. The way the men would watch me. And then I realized that they watched all the women like that. That it wasn’t… hungry.”

“Nothing like girls, yeah?” Alfie said quietly. “‘S what most of the lads talk about, up on the line. Food ‘n girls. Miss ‘em.”

“I was used to the men in Birmingham watching me. And all their wives- watching me.”

It hadn’t been too hateful, really. She wasn’t a threat, not to anybody. What Lizzie was, was a warning story.  _ Stay in the school, girls, or you’ll end up like poor Lizzie Stark.  _

“And now everyone is watching me again.” With a deep breath and flash of courage, Lizzie turned to meet Alfie’s grey-blue eyes. “I should have fucked him.”

He made that thoughtful humming noise again. “In the Talmud, right, there’s this story. Some fucking man saw a woman he had to fucking have. Mad for her. Thought she was the perfect woman, lost his little mind about her. So he goes to the doctors, and these fancy man-doctors, with their man-parts and their man-minds, right, they say if he can’t fuck this woman, he’ll die.”

Lizzie sent him a puzzled glance, lulled along by the rhythm of his words.

“So the doctors and this horny goat of a fucking man go to the elders and explain his situation. The doctors think he should get to fuck the pretty lady, cause that’ll save his life. Right? And the sages, they said, “Let this man die, that she may not have intercourse with him.” Can you fucking imagine?”

“No,” said Lizzie, surprised by the venom in her own voice. 

Captain Solomon’s mouth quirked into a little grin at her response. “The doctors keep trying; they come up with all these different mad solutions- she should take off her fucking clothes for ‘im, she should talk with him, she should stand by a fence and let ‘im tell her how beautiful she fucking is. That the man is owed this, right. That’s what the doctors think. And the sages keep saying, “Let him die.””

Lizzie managed a genuine smile for the big, rough, thoughtful man in front of her. “Maybe you’re right,” she said ruefully. “Maybe I should be Jewish.”

He pointed at her, nodding. “Fucking right, mate. But the whole point, yeah, is that you don’t owe anybody fucking anything. ‘S your body. Yours to do what you want. None of these horny bastards are gonna die when you say no.”

He reached over, picked up Lizzie’s cup of coffee, and drank down the burned, room-temperature brew. “Now c’mon,” he said, extending a hand to help her up from the bench. “Not gonna get you in more fucking trouble.”

They walked through the dark, quiet camp side by side. Lizzie felt… safe. It was a feeling she had trouble identifying; alien and seductive in its intensity. He was warm and quiet by her side, and despite the heavy build of his body, Lizzie didn’t feel the need to constantly monitor what he was doing. 

She  _ liked  _ him. 

When they’d mazed their way through the warren of tents, Lizzie took Alfie’s hand in hers and pulled him into the deep shadows between her tent and the next. His palm was warm and calloused, and he held hers just right: steady pressure, but not too tightly. With her eyes open- and his eyes were open too, glittering grey in the dim light of the stars- she leaned forward to press a gentle, close-mouthed kiss to his lips. His eyes blinked closed for the space of one heartbeat, and then Lizzie stepped back, feeling a blush riding high over her cheekbones. 

“Thank you,” she whispered, ducking around him and into her tent. “And goodnight.”

“‘Night, Miss Stark,” he whispered back. “And remember: let them die.”

* * *

And the Sages said, “Let him die.” --Sanhedrin 75a:2


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Previously on Because We’re Here:_
> 
> The field hospital overflows with soldiers starting on the first of July. Lizzie and the other staff work around the clock trying to triage wounded men, and Lizzie keeps looking for Tommy and Alfie among the wounded. On July 13th she finally passes out from exhaustion (a real life nurse actually did this!), and comes-to with Tommy and Alfie crouched over her. They put her to bed.  
> One of the soldiers she treated after the Somme recognized Lizzie from Birmingham and reported her to the Matron as a whore. The Matron wanted her thrown out of the VAD for this. (Historically, she really could have been.) The Matron takes Lizzie to the camp’s Commanding Officer to have her drummed out. At the last second Captain Solomons comes in to speak up for Lizzie, and she’s allowed to stay in the VAD.  
> After Lizzie’s hearing, Captain Solomons and Lizzie get a cup of coffee. Alfie tells her about a Talmudic story in which the sages determine that a woman has bodily autonomy. Lizzie kisses him beside her tent.

Through the long ward the gramophone  
Grinds out its nasal melodies:  
"Where did you get that girl?"; it shrills.  
The patients listen at their ease,  
Through clouds of strong tobacco smoke:  
The gramophone can always please.

…

Somehow for me these common tunes  
Can never sound the same again:  
They’ve magic now to thrill my heart  
And bring before me, clear and plain,  
Man that is master of his flesh,  
And has the laugh of death and pain.

\--Excerpt from _In A Soldiers' Hospital II: Gramophone Tunes_ , Eva Dobell

* * *

**July, 1917**

**Outside Passchendaele, Flanders.**

They were transferring more men to the front. The trucks and trains had come rolling in, and by now, after two years in service, Lizzie knew what that meant: they were preparing for another bloody offensive, and sooner than later those men would come right back down the tracks: bleeding, dead, and broken. 

She was at a different hospital now, and still working the night shift. She was happier here, attached to a group of Belgian and British medical staff. They cared a lot less about what she looked like and might have done, and valued what she _did._

The ward was quiet and peaceful, so Lizzie took a moment to dig her thumbs into her lower back, bracketing her spine, and _pushed._ She spent twelve hours a day crouching over low beds, and she was accustomed to the ache in her back and feet and hands. That didn’t mean she had to like it. 

Quietly she crossed to the nurses’ station, which glowed like a lighthouse. A battered gramophone sat on a crooked side table, wedged between the desk and a cabinet of supplies. Lizzie wound it and set the needle to playing: it crackled for a moment, but soon the low tones of _Let Me Call You Sweetheart_ were spooling out. 

“Thanks,” one of the men whispered as she passed his bed. 

“Of course,” said Lizzie. “Tell me if it bothers you.”

(Tommy wasn’t the only soldier to have problems sleeping.)

The hours ticked by and the ward settled, ever more silent. “Louise,” Lizzie whispered to the other night nurse. “Going for a smoke.”

Louise waved her off, the buttery glow of the dim lamps catching in her tight blonde braids. “Don’t get lost,” she whispered. 

Lizzie grinned, and stepped out into the soft summer night. Stars glittered through a haze of artillery smoke and oppressive humidity, and Lizzie closed her eyes as she took in that first perfect, burning drag of smoke. 

From somewhere on the other side of the hospital, in the shadows across the street, Lizzie heard a soft but distinctive _fuck._

She opened her eyes and glanced over, searching the shadows for movement. She couldn’t see anything, but the soft sounds carried to her on the breeze. 

“Hello?” Lizzie called. 

The sounds stopped. 

She scuffed out her cigarette and padded quietly across the road, straining her eyes to make out something in the shadows between the camp office and the telegraphy station. It had sounded a bit like someone staggering, and if they were coming to the hospital-

“It’s alright,” Lizzie said quietly, and then a heavy hand clamped over her mouth. 

Lizzie’s mind went all to static, and her body went stiff. 

“What’re you doing out?” a rough voice whispered. 

The hind slid off her mouth and cupped her throat. Whoever it was that was holding her, they were about the same size as her. Their heads were on a level from what Lizzie could make out, but his hands were calloused, heavy, and rough. 

“I’m a nurse,” she whispered. “I heard someone shuffle and swear, and I thought they might be hurt.” She wriggled, her heart still pounding. “So let me fucking go.”

Her assailant was quiet for a few minutes before his hands left her so abruptly that Lizzie stumbled forward. 

“Lizzie?” the voice asked. 

She turned, and the man who grabbed her stepped out of the shadow of the building. She’d recognize those sharp blue eyes anywhere, even now. “Tommy?” she whispered. 

His cheekbones were sharper, and his face was cleaner than when she’d last seen him. Maybe his days in the tunnels were behind him, here on this rocky ground. He looked leaner, but then- so did she. 

“What are you doing?” she asked. Behind him was one of the heavy ambulance trucks, the doors wide open. Bodies lined the stretchers, still and pale with the pallor of death. In the morning it would be driven down the line to the burial site, and the stretchers would come back empty.

He gave her a long, unblinking look, and it felt a bit like she was being scanned by the hospital’s new X-ray: like he could see things inside her that nobody had looked at before. 

“What’s happening?” Lizzie asked, glancing past Tommy where a second skinny kid was crouched in the ambulance. One of the bodies had been dragged onto the floor, and the kid had been undressing it when Lizzie arrived.

“Ignore him,” said Tommy, leaving no room for questions. 

She asked anyway. “It looks like he’s stealing those effects.”

Tommy grabbed Lizzie by the arm and steered her away from the ambulance. “Don’t fucking ask,” he said. “You didn’t see anything.”

Lizzie jerked free, and watched Tommy warily, all the while he watched her. Eventually the soft rustling noises stopped, and the doors to the ambulance clicked shut. The skinny kid padded up to Tommy, and looked from him to her and then back again. 

To Lizzie’s surprise, he tapped Tommy’s elbow quickly, _taptap,_ with the first two fingers of his right hand. 

“Go back to line,” said Tommy. “I’ll be back later.” He didn’t bother to look away from Lizzie. The dare (the _threat_ ) was clear. 

The boy looked at her and then sped off into the darkness, his boots making almost no noise over the exposed stone of the patchy road. 

“Now what?” Lizzie asked, crossing her arms.

“I’m breaking into the command office,” he said, eyes wary. 

Lizzie blinked, and felt herself teetering on the precipice of ...something. Something important. “Alright,” she whispered, firmly falling off the fence and choosing her side. “I’ll stand lookout, then?” 

“It’d be easier if I had some bloody light,” said Tommy, retreating back into the shadows and crouching by the door. Lizzie was tempted to light another cigarette (why else would she be standing around outside in the middle of the night?) but didn’t think Tommy would want her to call attention to herself. 

Soon enough she heard the door snick open behind her, and then she could smell the phosphorus flare of a match. 

“You know where things are in here?” he asked. 

Lizzie backed up, making sure to keep her eyes trained on the road. “Sometimes.”

“Where’s the mail kept? Before it’s distributed or sent out?” 

“In the back, under the counter,” said Lizzie. “Cubbies by unit. Outgoing is in a bag hanging on the back of the door.”

He disappeared inside soundlessly, leaving Lizzie alone in the warm evening breeze. As she lit another cigarette she wondered why she was doing this; why she was risking everything for Tommy. (Again.)

Back home everyone knew the Shelbys. They were the collective terrors of Small Heath, dispensing maimings and hope in equal measure. Maybe they filled some kind of… traditional British fantasy. The men who the law couldn’t catch. The outlaws who took care of their own. They fit into the narrative of a world that had gone mostly mad, and they were loved and reviled for it. 

That was the thing, wasn’t it? Lizzie tilted her head back to look up at the stars, while Tommy did whatever it was he did inside. The Shelbys did terrible things. Awful things. They were called the Blinders for a fucking reason. But they had a code of their own, under all that. A simple one. 

Whatever it was that Tommy was doing in there, he had a fucking reason. That was enough for Lizzie. 

“Alright,” said Tommy, close enough that Lizzie could feel his breath on the back of her neck. She jumped, and Tommy sneakily grabbed her half-finished cigarette from her fingers. 

“You working?” he asked, taking a long drag. 

“Supposed to be,” said Lizzie, wanting to ask. Wanting to ask, and not quite bringing herself to give the words voice.

Tommy nodded. “C’mon, then.”

He walked her across the road in silence. “When d’you get off?” he asked her by the door. 

“Eight.”

“Right. Eight. I’ll see you then, eh? We’ll get breakfast.”

“But-”

“Eight,” he said, and then he was gone. 

When Lizzie got inside, Louise sent her a wink. “I thought I told you not to get lost?”

Lizzie spent the remainder of her shift anxious, anticipatory, and calm. Whatever it was he’d done, she’d been an accomplice to it. It was good that he wanted to see her. Maybe he’d explain- or maybe he’d only make his explicit threats. 

If that was it, he didn’t need to bother. She already knew that if Tommy went down for whatever it was he’d done, he’d take her right down with him. 

Not even the gramophone helped her while away the hours in the usually cozy ward. Lizzie was too agitated to settle into her rounds, and the gently static of the records scraped at her nerves. The sun couldn’t come up fast enough, and finally, _finally,_ the light outside faded from navy to lavender to a weak and water kind of dawn. 

The sun rose. The day shift came. Lizzie barely held still through the morning brief, and then she was out the side door and nearly plowing into Tommy, who caught her by the shoulders. 

“Running away?” he asked, one eyebrow raised. The unlit cigarette he was toying with bounced in the corner of his mouth. 

“No,” said Lizzie, startled breathless. 

One corner of his mouth quirked as he let her go and turned towards the mess hall. “C’mon. Promised you breakfast.”

It was Lizzie’s supper, but she didn’t bother to correct him. After two years, she was used to toast and bacon for her dinner. (After a lifetime of being just slightly hungry, she wouldn’t turn her nose up at toast and bacon _ever._ )

They joined the line of men and women waiting outside the mess hall. The queue moved quickly: the men on the line or back in the reinforcement camps cooked their own meals. This hall only served the officers, the medical staff, and the support staff. Lizzie was very grateful for it. 

She gathered her plate of bacon and toast, smeared plum and apple jam over the later, and filled a mug with the dishwater weak coffee of which the Belgians seemed so fond. Tommy did the same, but when Lizzie steered them towards the back of the dining hall he jerked his head towards the door. “Let’s eat outside,” he said. 

Lizzie shrugged and followed him, curious enough to go along with his lord-of-the-war attitude.

“Nice morning,” she said evenly as Tommy sat down on a jut of granite that was exposed by the slope of the hill away from camp. 

He grunted, and Lizzie tore into her toast. Tommy just toyed with his still-unlit cigarette. 

“You’re wanting to know what we did, then,” he said quietly, looking out over the bright morning. 

Lizzie grunted her own affirmation, chewing her stringy bacon with gusto. 

“The boy- that you saw- he’s fifteen.”

Lizzie raised an eyebrow. 

“Joined up last year. Tall for his age, had some schooling. I think they’re running out of fucking men to send over here,” he said bitterly. “Jacobs- that’s his name- ‘s already been shot twice. Nobody did a damn fucking thing.”

Lizzie sipped her coffee. She wished the story was a more uncommon one. Boys joined up to go off and fight the hun. Somehow it never registered that they could get killed along the way. 

(What did it say about her, that she now knew there were fates worse than a quick death from an unseen bullet?)

“He’s stopped talking. Has since the second time they sent him back up to the line. Hadn’t said a fucking thing. Sits and stares.”

“How long has it been?” Lizzie asked. 

“Two months.”

She set down her empty plate and sipped her weak coffee. 

“The dead man,” said Tommy slowly, still ignoring his breakfast. “Was set to go home in a few days. Orders came through. He’d been wounded enough time, or knew the right fucking people.”

“You’re having them change places.”

Tommy nodded, still watching the horizon. “Send the kid home. Roger won’t miss it.”

“What happens after he gets back to England?” Lizzie asked. 

Tommy shrugged. “I don’t know. But it’ll be better than here.”

Anywhere would be better than here. 

“I wanted - fucking explain,” he said abruptly.

“I wouldn’t have told,” said Lizzie. 

He shrugged. “I didn’t think you would. I just wanted you to know. To know why.”

“You had to get the death notice back?” Lizzie guessed. “From the office, before it went off to his family.”

Tommy nodded. 

“Aren’t you going to eat?” Lizzie asked, gesturing to his plate.

Tommy scuffed the toast around, but finally started gnawing on a skinny slice of bacon. “Thank you,” he said. “For what you did.”

It was Lizzie’s turn to shrug. Tommy munched his bacon, and then slid his untouched toast onto Lizzie’s plate. She wasn’t about to turn down more food, so they sat for a few minutes in companionable silence. 

“Why did you help me?” Tommy asked. 

Lizzie thought about it, trying to find the words. “It felt like the right thing,” she said. “The Blinders, back home-”

Tommy turned to look at her, those cool eyes piercing. 

“They always see to it that widows and kids get a portion. Even if it was them that killed the dad. I figured, if you needed something from that dead man… you had a reason.”

Tommy shook his head. “You’re gonna get killed over here. Too fucking trusting, Lizzie girl.”

“There are worse things to be,” said Lizzie quietly, knocking her shoulder against Tom’s. “Worse things.” They sat and watched the sun rise, brilliant and beautiful over a nameless field in Flanders. Lizzie had felt… not quite alone, but untethered since her mother’s death. How strange, that she’d make friends like this: over stealing the identity of a dead man in the middle of a war.

~~~

Tommy stood by Alfie, watching Jacobs-turned-Smith pull away. 

“He better not fucking start talking now,” Alfie murmured, watching the train gather speed. 

Tommy huffed a humorless laugh. “Be our fucking luck.”

Alfie crooked his elbow around Tommy’s neck and drug him in close, knocking him off balance. “You have the luck of the fucking Rom, mate. It’s either shit, or fucking jam, right?”

“Bout that,” said Tommy, ducking out from under Alfie’s arm and heading back to the reinforcement camp. “One of the nurses saw me.”

“Saw you what? Your tallywags? They’re fucking professionals-”

Tommy groaned. “Shut up.. No. She saw me and Jacobs that night.”

One of Alfie’s thick eyebrows slowly raised. “And then wot fucking happened?”

“She stood watch while I broke in and got the death notice.”

Now both eyebrows were climbing towards his hairline. “And you did what to this poor woman in order to convince her to give you this great fucking bounty?”

Tommy shook his head, wishing (not for the first time) that Alfie had the ability to talk in a straight line. “No. Remember that girl, back at the Somme? Brummie? You kept asking if she wanted to be a Jew?”

Alfie’s expression cleared, and then stretched into a grin. “Lizbet’s up here? What the fuck is she doing in this godforsaken country?”

“Nursing, apparently,” said Tommy, finally letting himself light his last cigarette. Tomorrow the supply sergeant would be issuing more. He could make it one night. He could.

“I liked her,” said Alfie. 

Tommy snorted. “I know.”

“So she knows about your little scheme, hmm. And she kept your fucking secret. That’s a nice girl, Tom.”

Tommy blew out a stream of acrid, familiar smoke. 

“Maybe we ought to go up and check on her,” said Alfie, turning thoughtfully towards camp. “It’s the friendly thing to do.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Tommy, smoking his cigarette until the flame was scorching his fingers. “Friendly. That’s what we are.” He remembered her soft brown doe-eyes and stubborn chin, and felt distinctly _unfriendly._

~~~

There was going to be a concert. A trio of American women had been touring haphazardly across the Front, driving from camp to camp and making do with whatever it was they had available.

“Our men don’t want to go to war,” said one of them when Lizzie ran into her in the mess hall. “The least we could do is come entertain yours.”

She’d been so -soft. Her face had been smooth and worry free. She’d smelled like wonderful, elegant perfume, and her stockings had been fine and new and mend-free. It was an odd reminder of ...something. Something Lizzie would never have been, true, but something more than that.

“We’ll just prop the doors open,” said Louise as she and Louise started their evening rounds. This late into the summer the sun still wasn’t fully down by eight, so long fingers of sunshine crept across the crisp white sheets and rough-hewn floor. People laughed and chatted as they tramped by to find the makeshift stage, and even in the hospital there was a general feeling of high energy and good cheer. 

“I wish this was already better,” said Private Janssens as Lizzie paused by his bed. He gestured towards his freshly plastered leg, which was propped up on two pillows. “Then I could find a way to dance with you.”

“I’m not dancing,” she told him, checking his chart to see if it was time for his aspirin. “I’m right here with you.”

“Lucky me,” he said, smiling up at her. 

Soon enough the sound of foot traffic died down, and music carried to Lizzie on the breeze. It wasn’t a tune she could make out: more like the sounds of a dream, or snippets of a tune she’d heard a long time ago. It was a beautiful, mild evening, and the sky was still shot through with brilliant pinks and purples. In times like these it was hard to remember that the world existed outside of the war, that she hadn’t always lived in a tent and been treated to the views of a Flanders twilight. Maybe this was the world, now. Maybe this is all it ever was.

Applause and laughter carried to her on the breeze, more jarring and unexpected than falling shells. Just under an hour passed, and then the day nurses cane through the door, their cheeks pink and hair mussed. It looked like they’d shared one color of lipstick between the two of them, and that suspicion was confirmed when Nora took the tube out of her pocket and held it out to Lizzie. “Go on, then,” she said, flashing a grin at Lizzie and Louise. “We’ll watch the shop while you have a go.”

“But-”

“We got to see the singers,” said Elise, untying Lizzie’s apron and lifting it over her head. She tied it on over her own civilian dress, and Lizzie finally started moving. 

“Thank you,” she said, taking the lipstick and walking over to where a little sliver of mirror was kept in the nurse’s desk. Louise had her turn with the lipstick, and after smoothing their hair and pinching their cheeks the two of them were hurrying down the dark road into the town proper, where it seemed most of the people and half the camp had gathered to drink and dance. 

Someone’s upright piano had been wheeled out into the street, and next to the piano stood a violinist. One of the yanks was singing about a soldier finding love, and everyone- _everyone-_ was smiling or drinking or dancing. They were all people in an impossible situation, but beneath it all, that’s what they always were: people. And people carried on. 

One of the telegraphers grabbed Louise and pulled her into dance with him. She shrieked and laughed and went, and Lizzie laughed too. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen this much good cheer; she wanted to bottle it and put it away for a time when she needed it again. 

“Miss Stark!” The supply sergeant had seen her, and pushed between dancing couples to find her. “You’re playing hooky?” 

“I’m covered for an hour or so,” said Lizzie, smiling.

Sergeant Maes bowed to her, and Lizzie curtsied theatrically back. The violin was sawing out some kind of reel, and around them couples were dancing every which way. It was messy and wonderful. Maes pulled Lizzie into a simple two-step, and she kept up with him easily as they circled around the stone-cobbled square. He spun her, but it was a different pair of hands that caught her. 

“My turn,” said Tommy, as Maes nodded in defeat. The song changed, flowing into a quick foxtrot, and Tommy pulled her close. 

“You dance well,” he told her. 

“Worked in a dance hall,” she said by way of explanation. 

“Yeah?” he asked, pulling her closer still so that her feet were always bracketed by his own. “Better show me, then.”

She did. He moved beautifully, and if she wasn’t so incandescently happy it would have registered as unfair that he was good at everything. She’d seen him riding through Birmingham on the backs of half-mad horses. He could dance, he could shoot, he could triage his men and build a bomb.

“Thank you,” said Lizzie a little breathlessly as the song ended. 

Tommy winked at her, and then she noticed that actually he wasn’t looking at her- he was looking somewhere over her shoulder. 

“Don’t monopolize the girl, mate,” said Alfie, and two heavy hands wrapped around Lizzie’s waist and turned her towards him. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you to share?”

“She might have,” said Tommy as Lizzie have Alfie a quick hug. “Since when did I listen to my fucking mum?”

“You’re alright!” Lizzie beamed at Alfie. She’d wondered what had happened to him after the Somme, when he’d stood up for her with the colonel. (When he’d kissed her in the dark.)

“I’m alright,” he echoed, scanning her up and down. “You’re fucking fabulous, aren’t you?”

Tommy snorted, and Alfie waved him away imperiously. “My turn to dance with her, right? Bugger off.”

Lizzie grinned, and Alfie grinned back. He’d likely shaved that morning, but already the shadow of thick stubble darkened his cheeks. “Tommy told me you were here,” he said, taking her hand in his. “Wanted to come see for myself.”

“Small war,” Lizzie murmured as the piano ripped into a bright ragtime tune. Around her people cheered, and her cheeks were starting to ache from smiling. 

“You’ve been alright?” Alfie asked as he pulled her into a turn. Usually Lizzie felt too thin and tall and gangly. She was as tall as most of the men, and without the lush curves of Elise. But tonight it felt perfect- she could watch Alfie’s eyes, and yet he led her with ease. “Nobody’s bothered you?” he asked. 

Lizzie caught herself flirting before she could help herself. “And what would you do if I had been?” she asked, pressing a little closer. 

His eyes went hot before crinkling with amusement. “Break some fucking legs, love. There’s a war on- people get hurt all the damn time.”

“That shouldn’t make me feel better,” said Lizzie, glancing at Alfie through her lashes. “But it does.”

“We’re all just animals,” he said, steering her towards the edge of the dancers where Tommy was leaning against the brick wall of a shop front. “Violence is in our very fucking natures, and it’s right and natural to glory that violence, yeah. The primacy of it. Besides-” he said, his voice losing the sing-song quality he took on when giving a speech. “I think Tom here would kill for you too. But that’s just a Tuesday to him, so don’t read too much into it.”

Tommy made a face at Alfie, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it. He passed Lizzie a tin mug, and when she bent to take a sip she could smell the now-familiar tang of rum burning her sinuses. She swallowed down a mouthful of the cheap stuff with only a little gasp, and then offered the cup to Alfie. 

“Nah, none for me love. ‘M terrible when I’m on the stuff.”

Lizzie shrugged and drank another burning mouthful, enjoying the scorching warmth as it burned through her chest. Tommy finished the mug and then pulled her into dance again.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Lizzie asked, feeling herself flush as she glanced at Tommy’s beautiful pale eyes. He’d always been good looking, but… strangely so. He reminded Lizzie of the passage Jeremiah used to read over baptised babies: fearfully and wonderfully formed. Tommy was almost eerie in his perfection: all smooth skin and sharp-cut angles to highlight the soft paleness of his eyes. 

“You’re the one looking at me,” said Tommy, brushing aside her comment. “Just wondering what a girl like you is doing here.”

“Girl like me?” Lizzie asked. _That girl Lizzie Stark, she’s no better than she should be. Girl like her, she’s good for only one thing. No wonder that a girl like Lizzie ended up on her back-_

“A nice girl,” said Tommy, his brow furrowing. 

_Oh._ Lizzie let out a little sigh at that, and gave into the temptation to rest her forehead on Tommy’s shoulder, just for a moment. He thought she was a _nice_ girl. Even though she’d been an accomplice to misnaming a dead body and helping that boy desert, he thought she was nice. 

“I’m here for the same thing that you are,” she said, cautiously looking into his face again before letting her gaze drift over the dancing crowd again. 

“You fucking volunteered too?”

“Yes,” said Lizzie, hanging onto his fingers a little too tightly as he spun her into a turn.

“More fool us,” said Tommy, reeling her back in. 

Lizzie shrugged but grinned at him anyway, too happy to dwell on the moment. (This had been her best option. Sometimes there were no good options.) “I don’t know,” she said, letting her fingers run over the short fuzz of hair on the back of his neck. “Sometimes it isn’t so bad.”

Tommy gave her a hot, thoughtful look and began herding her out of the main press of bodies. “I need to get back,” said Lizzie, breathless and flushed and incandescently happy. Perfect moments like these never lasted- they fizzled out like shooting stars, burned out by the brutal friction of the world,but oh… for those few shining moments, everything was good. 

“We’ll walk you back,” said Alfie, looping Lizzie’s arm through his. The rum still had her fingers tingling, but she was clear-headed enough during the quiet walk back. It was a pretty night, hazy and mild, and the sound of revelry drifted on the soft summer air. She had a handsome man on either side of her, and like this… it was easy to pretend they were all here for a fair; for nothing more threatening than a night of overindulgence and indiscriminate revelry. 

“It was so good to see you again,” she told her escorts when they found themselves back in the shadow of the hospital. “I’m glad you’re alright.”

Up the road, the piano and plaintive violin slowed to an old waltz. The harmonies were lost over the distance, but the familiar three beat meter persisted. 

Alfie gently turned her towards him, one of his heavy hands at her back, and the other wrapped around her fingers. “One more,” he said, and the teasing was gone from his voice. “Then it all goes back to normal, right? Back to the war. You’ll go in the nice hospital here, and Tommy and me’ll go back to our hole, and we’ll wake up in the morning and hate Gerry all over again. Yeah?”

“Alright,” said Lizzie, closing her eyes against that image; against the idea that she would go back to being just another nurse in another hospital along the front of this endless, endless war. “One more.” She could cling to this sense of friendship and acceptance for a few heartbeats more.

Carefully Alfie began to rock in a gentle waltz step, pressing forward and back as Lizzie followed along. 

About halfway through the song Lizzie startled: Tommy’s hands had both come to rest lightly on her hips, and she could feel how close he was to her back. He danced the women’s steps with her, careful and warm, and oh- this was bliss. This was belonging, even if it was only borrowed for a few scant, moonlight moments: a Cinderella only steps away from midnight. They didn’t seem to expect anything from her but her smiles, and that respect made her want to give them everything and more. 

Lizzie had been a dance hall lightskirt: she knew how many ways three bodies could come together. That thought sent a sharp bolt of shame through her- she was fallen, and they were her friends. She knew better than anyone that friendliness didn’t equate to sexual interest. They deserved better from her.

“Relax,” said Tommy, his breath warm on her ear. Lizzie breathed deeply and tried to focus only on this moment, this second in time. Alfie’s hand was rough against hers. Tommy’s hands were longer and narrower, but no less warm. In this half-light Alfie’s eyes had gone to silver-grey, and he had an old scar bisecting his eyebrow. 

“Look at me like that, love, and I might want to steal you afuckingway,” he said, rumbly and dark. 

The music slowed to a stop, but still the three of them remained close; posed like the figurines of an erotic music box. Slowly Alfie lowered his head to Lizzie’s, making sure she had plenty of time to turn her head away. Lizzie didn’t: she pressed forward, catching Alfie’s mouth with her own and sliding her palm down Tommy’s forearm to twine her fingers with his. 

Alfie’s mouth was soft and warm, and he kissed her with long, lingering brushes of his lips along hers; a delicious and damp friction. Tommy’s hands held her tightly, and Lizzie felt shivery and hot and -and _wanted._ Wanted in the most wonderful way. 

Alfie eventually broke the kiss, much to Lizzie’s disappointment. She could have kept kissing him forever, until she suffocated or got hit with a falling shell, and any amount of time would have been worth it. But instead of stepping back, away from her, Alfie pressed even closer. He scraped his scruffy chin over the side of Lizzie’s neck, and then- Jesus fucking christ, Alfie and Tommy were kissing right there, right over her shoulder, while they pinned her in place with their hips. 

When they broke apart, all three of them were breathing hard. 

“Fucking hell, Lizbet,” Alfie mumbled, bending down to kiss her again, his lips still slick from Tommy. His hands scrabbled at her, and then she was being turned into Tommy’s arms. 

“Finally,” he mumbled, and then kissed her so hard she backed up against Alfie’s chest. Tommy’s kisses had an edge, much like his caps back home. He nibbled at her, driving the kiss like it was something stolen; like the police were hot on their tail. 

Maybe it was the war- probably it was the war. It was reckless and more than a little insane to be so gone for these two men; men with whom she’d spend a sum total of three days? Four? But that didn’t matter, now. They made her feel alive and cared for and wanted, just for herself. Lizzie had been an island for so long; had been a commodity for so long. Here, surrounded by all this ugliness, she deserved to grab something for herself. 

“Go on,” said Tommy, stepping back and jerking his head towards the hospital. “Inside.”

Lizzie’s lips were tingling from all their kissing, and even Tommy’s looked swollen and used. “Hmm?” She didn’t want to stop kissing. She didn’t want to stop at all. 

Alfie chuckles. “In you go, love. Don’t want to big bad wolf to get you.” He gave her a soft pat on the behind as Lizzie wandered towards the door. 

“Wait,” said Tommy, and Lizzie turned towards him hoping- wondering-

He licked the pad of his thumb and swiped it roughly against the corner of her mouth. “Lipstick,” he said shortly. 

“Oh,” said Lizzie softly. “Well. Thank you both. It was lovely.”

It felt almost like she’d been on a date, and some sweet schoolboy was walking her home. (But she wasn’t home, they weren’t schoolboys, and there were _two of them._ )

“We’ll be seeing you, Lizbet,” said Alfie, and then she was through the door and the reality of the world came rushing back. There was a war, and death, and crippling loneliness… but now there were men. 

Two of them. 

“Fuck,” said Lizzie succinctly, and then got on with her work. 

* * *

The wind is cold and heavy  
And storms are in the sky:  
Our path across the heather  
Goes higher and still high.   
To right, the town we came from  
To left, blue hills and sea:  
The wind is growing colder  
And shivering are we.   
We drag with stiffening fingers  
Our rifles up the hill.  
The path is steep and tangled  
But leads to Flanders still. 

_\--In Training,_ Edward Shanks


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Previously on Because We’re Here_  
>  Lizzie caught Tommy and another young soldier taking the clothes off of a dead soldier. The young man dons the dead soldier’s clothes, and then (against her better judgement) Lizzie keeps watch while Tommy breaks into the command office to destroy the death notice.  
> Tommy reports all of this back to Alfie, who expresses interest in seeing Lizzie again. The men get their chance when an American singing group comes through town. There’s an informal dance, and Lizzie dances with both Alfie and Tommy. They walk her back to the hospital to complete her shift, and they waltz with her sandwiched in the middle. They all kiss.

Under the level winter sky  
I saw a thousand Christs go by.  
They sang an idle song and free  
As they went up to Calvary.

Careless of eye and coarse of lip,   
They marched in holiest fellowship.  
That heaven might heal the world, they gave  
Their earth-born dreams to deck the grave.

With souls unpurged and steadfast breath  
They supped the sacrament of death.   
And for each one, far off, apart,   
Seven swords have rent a woman’s heart.

_Marching Men,_ Marjorie Pickthall

* * *

**August 7, 1918**

**Outside Amiens, France.**

_ Third time lucky.  _

Rawlins’ Fourth Army was back, and that meant there was going to be a slaughter. (Rawlins’ Fourth Army was back, and that meant Tommy and Alfie were nearby.)

As shells rained down in the distance, familiar and ominous, Lizzie helped the others set up the hospital tent. They’d been moved into this sector along with the Fourth, and gone was the modular wooden-walled hospital she’d worked in for the Somme. The surgery lamp was a lantern strung on a taut rope. The ward was a long peaked tent, and storage consisted of wooden crates heaped neatly in the corner. 

Lizzie had been overseas for nearly three years. It felt like three hundred. 

The supply train hadn’t stopped running in days. More and more shells and ammunition were arriving, and it would be amazing if Europe had any ore left in it. Australian and Canadian battalions had moved through their camp, tall and accented and bright-eyed in a way that Lizzie hadn’t seen since she’d left England. There was new tension in the air; an anticipatory crackle that traveled from person to person. She could almost feel the strategic pieces falling into place for this campaign: hundreds of tanks, thousands of men, and a heady forlorn hope. 

The men began pouring into camp just after five in the morning on August the eighth- only they weren’t wounded. They weren’t even Allied troops. Thousands of Germans had surrendered, and apparently kept surrendering. 

“This is eerie,” said Elise, toying with the edge of her washed-soft apron. She and Lizzie were sitting side-by-side on crates in the empty and mostly dark hospital tent, while all around them were the sounds of soft German conversation. 

“They don’t seem particularly fierce,” said Lizzie, picking at a hangnail. 

Elise shrugged. “Probably they’re as tired as we are. They’ve been at it just as long.”

That was true. 

Dawn brought the first round of wounded, and then Lizzie didn’t have time to think anymore. They were busy, but it was nothing like the massacres at the Somme or Passchendaele. Maybe they really were winning, maybe this could be the turning point of the war-

And then she turned to triage the next round of soldiers, and froze at the sight of familiar blue-grey eyes. 

“Alfie?” she whispered, dropping to her knees by his stretcher. 

“Lizbet,” he whispered, his face grey with pain. “Don’t let ‘em take my fucking leg.”

Lizzie pulled surgical scissors from her pocket and began cutting the field bandages that had been tied over Alfie’s thigh and knee. 

“Not my fucking leg, Lizzie,” he said, his voice a rasp. “Don’t let ‘em.”

Lizzie fumbled for a fresh syringe. She’d have to pick the remnants of his trousers out of the mess of his leg before he could go into surgery, and- and then they’d see, wouldn’t they. 

“The doctor might-”

When his fingers clamped around her wrist, she could see that blood had soaked into every crevice of his skin. “Not my leg.”

“Alright,” she said, pressing the plunger and sending the morphine into his bloodstream. “I hear you.”

He went slack, his eyes half-open and creased in discomfort. 

“Lizzie!” Elise called sharply. “Another load coming.”

“I have to clean this one up,” said Lizzie, pushing up to fetch a tray of clean tools. 

Elise glanced over. “We may not have time.” 

The meat of Alfie’s thigh had a chunk of shrapnel jutting from it, and the area around his knee was a mess of blood and skin and uniform. It looked like it had been crushed. Elise was right: if the flow of wounded men continued, they’d have to amputate. It would save Alfie, and buy the doctor enough time to work on two or three men besides. 

“Captain Solomons,” Lizzie whispered, crouching by Alfie’s head. “ _ Alfie. _ Listen.”

“Listening,” he mumbled. 

“You might have to wait. If you want us to operate properly on the leg, we could- you’ll have to wait. Maybe a while.”

“I’ll wait,” he said, loud enough for Elise to hear him too. 

“No guarantees,” said Elise in her calm, matter-of-fact way. “But we’ll try.”

They both knew that in the end, they might still have to take the leg. And the longer they waited to remove the shrapnel, the higher the likelihood of a major infection. It was a choice Lizzie had made a thousand times, and one that already haunted her. Specters of the boys who had died, and the men who had cursed and fought when they discovered they yet lived: limbless, changed, forever transformed. 

With a quick brush of her fingers over Alfie’s forehead, Lizzie pushed to her feet and went back to work. 

~~~

“What about this one?” asked Dr. Hunter, dunking his hands in the reddened basin of rubbing alcohol. He jerked his chin towards Alfie, and tiredly rolled his neck. 

“Came in this morning,” said Lizzie, trying to keep her voice even and professional. “Insisted that we keep his leg. Elise and I told him that he’d have to wait, if that’s what he wanted.”

Dr. Hunter have her a sharp look. “We don’t let the patients make decisions for us, Miss Stark.”

“I know,” said Lizzie quietly. 

Hunter studied her as though he was waiting for a further explanation. When none was forthcoming, he turned back to Alfie. “He’s waited this long,” said Hunter. “Let’s see what we can do.”

~~~

He lived through the long surgery, and in the wee hours of the morning his fever slowly spiked, gradually climbing ever higher. 

“I warned him,” Lizzie murmured when Dr. Hunter gave her a long look. “I did. But he wanted the leg.”

“He might take it right into the grave,” said Dr. Hunter, peeling back the sheet to check Alfie’s stitches. The wound to his thigh looked as well as could be expected, with only a few dots of fresh blood coloring the bandage. It was Alfie’s knee that turned Lizzie’s stomach: it had been crushed, with slivers of metal embedded in the muscle around his knee cap. It had swollen into a terrible purple mess, and Lizzie hoped they had enough sedatives and morphine to keep him unconscious for the next few days. 

The battle- whatever there was of it- went on. There hadn’t been any more mass surrenders from the German troops, but neither did the hospital see waves and waves of wounded they way they had during other major offenses. Alfie remained in his cot, sweating and delirious, and Lizzie tried not to hover by his side. Elise already knew there was something going on between them, but didn’t comment.

The wound in Alfie’s leg went septic. Lizzie helped Dr. Hunter open and drain it, while all around Alfie’s bed the other soldiers healed and were put on the train for home. More soldiers came in to replace them, and Lizzie’s worry only grew. Influenza cases joined the wounded, and it felt like the world was ending all over again. How many times could one world end, but have it be the same war?

By now all the men had to be different. New guns, new tanks, new stupid reasons to fight. How was this still Thesus’ ship? (How was this still their war?)

Two days after his surgery, Tommy came to see Captain Solomons. 

“Why’s he strapped down?” he asked, his mouth set into an angry line. 

“The fever,” said Lizzie, her voice rough with exhaustion. “He thinks he’s- I don’t know where he thinks he is.”

Tommy’s gazed snapped to her face, and Lizzie knew what he wanted to ask. They both knew better than to give it voice. No, she didn’t know if he would die. No, she wouldn’t make either of them a promise she couldn’t keep. 

“He wanted to keep the leg,” she said quietly, filling the empty space in their conversation. “He insisted.”

“You should have insisted back.”

Lizzie’s hackles rose. She was too tired to deal with this; she’d been too tired for it for a long, long time. “You would have wanted to live with one leg? You would rather I ignore anything you request of me? I’ll remember that next time you’re in one of these cots, Tommy Shelby.”

For most of these men, the last choice they’d really made was to join up. Their clothes were assigned, their tasks assigned, the food was shipped to them in tins, the locations of their fucking privys were made by command. They didn’t have anything: not dignity, not a choice, not an option. The least she could do was respect one when she heard it. 

(She could give these men the dignity of a choice, even if she’d never really been given one. Things were always fucking different for men.)

“Let me know when his fever breaks,” said Tommy brusquely, and then he was gone, absorbed into the darkness beyond the hospital tent. 

Over the next few days, Lizzie couldn’t help but wonder about him. Maybe he’d only tolerated her for Alfie’s sake; maybe when he’d kissed her he’d been playing along- but it hadn’t felt like that. It hadn’t felt like that at all. 

~~~

Alfie’s fever finally broke. 

“Water,” he whispered through cracked lips. 

Lizzie rushed over, cupped his head, and slowly tipped water into his mouth. “Do you know where you are?”

“Hell,” Alfie muttered, craning his neck towards the cup. 

Lizzie gave him more water before asking again. “Captain Solomons, where are you?”

“Fucking- France, innit? Right. Hell.”

His voice was thin, but he sounded like himself again- not the crying, raving lunatic he’d been on nights when his fever spiked too high. 

“It’s been eight days,” said Lizzie, propping her hip on the edge of his cot. “You’re in hospital.”

Alfie opened one eye, and then blearily shut it again. “Tent. Fucking tent. War better not last forty bloody years. My people do not do well in tents.”

“If you’re making jokes, you must be feeling better,” said Lizzie, placing her fingers over Alfie’s forehead in an unconscious reflex. He had a week’s worth of beard, and his eyes were deepset and gaunt in a slightly frightening way… but his fever was gone. 

“Feel fucking awful,” Alfie mumbled.

“I bet you do.”

“Leg hurts like a bitch. Must have kept it, then.” He gave his leg a slight roll from side to side, and hissed the resulting pain out from between his teeth. 

“You went septic,” she told him. “But you kept your leg.”

“Good,” said Alfie, and Lizzie could see that he was fading into sleep again. “I owe you.”

“A leg?” Lizzie asked, trying and failing to keep from stroking her fingers down his stubbled cheek. No use in joking- Alfie was already asleep.

Lizzie hovered over Alfie for the last hour of her shift, but he didn’t wake again. 

“Do you want to come with me for supper?” Elise asked, peeling off her apron. 

“No,” said Lizzie, distracted. “But thank you. I’ve got an errand to run.”

Elise looked suspicious, but nodded at Lizzie before walking off into the quickly falling darkness. 

Lizzie headed the opposite direction, following the rutted path out of their support camp and down towards the trenches. Men typically had a week in the trenches, and then a week in the recovery camp behind the lines, on and on and on, but always-  _ always-  _ within the wailing, screaming reach of shell fire. 

She wrapped her cardigan more tightly around herself- after weeks of oppressive heat, finally there was a storm on the horizon. The wind had already picked up, and as Lizzie trundled down the gentle hill, she could see the intermittent reflection of shell fire illuminating the low-hanging clouds. 

_ Stupid,  _ she told herself.  _ Stupid to not send a messenger.  _

“Sergeant-Major Shelby?” Lizzie asked one of the sentries posted along the road. 

He gazed at her dully, taking in her nurse’s uniform and VAD badge. “That way.”

Lizzie went. 

Night had fully fallen now, and when shells hit up at the line Lizzie could feel the rumble in her shoes. The heavy summer air smelled like unwashed bodies with a faint hint of woodsmoke, and occasionally, when the wind blew in from the east, the breeze smelled clean and cool, like running water. 

Another sentry stopped her, and again she got directions. Lizzie felt like she was wandering through a labyrinth of humanity; a never-ending winding route through despair. Maybe they’d all fallen into one of Dante’s stories. If they had, nobody had noticed. 

Finally Lizzie followed another narrow feeder road along which narrow tracks had been laid. The tents around her had gone quiet, and all of the little cook fires had been extinguished. If not for the faint glow of the staggered sentries’ safety lanterns, Lizzie would have been walking through the pitch dark. 

Heavy hands grabbed her shoulders, and Lizzie barely muffled her shriek. She turned, and came face to face with Tommy. 

“What are you doing here, eh?” he hissed, tugging her back between two parked ambulances. “Digger said some woman was looking for me. How could you be so fucking stupid?” His hands were still gripping her shoulders, and his eyes were overbright in his dirt-smudged face. 

“Alfie woke up,” said Lizzie, shaking Tommy off of her. “His fever broke. I thought you’d want to know.”

“You should have sent somebody down to tell me,” said Tommy, peering over Lizzie’s shoulder into the darkness. “Fuck, Lizzie, what are you doing? Eh?”

He still wasn’t looking at her. That infuriated Lizzie more than his gruffness and odd mixed messages- after everything, after risking her career to watch him break into command headquarters back in Flanders- he couldn’t fucking look at her. 

“I’m fucking telling you something,” said Lizzie, deliberately stepping into his line of vision. When his cold blue eyes met hers, she didn’t look away. “That the man I know you love-”

Tommy made a derisive noise, and his eyes skittered away from hers again- 

“Has woken up. The fever finally broke, and since I thought- since we’re  _ friends,  _ I thought I’d come tell you myself.”

“Why?” Tommy asked again, his square jaw sharp enough that Lizzie might cut herself slapping it. “You want something too. Everyone fucking wants something, eh? So what do you want? A quick fuck, to return the favors you’ve done?”

He crowded her back against the steel frame of the tall ambulance, and when the next shell wailed and flared the shadows made his deep-set eyes and high cheekbones look a little like a skull. “This what you want? Fucking tell me,  _ Miss Stark.” _ He braced his arms on either side of her face, leaning close enough that she could feel his warm breath against her lips. Lizzie stomped hard on his foot and shoved him back, swallowing hard. 

He was trying to hurt her. They both knew that- she just didn’t know  _ why. _

“I said what I came here to say,” said Lizzie, her throat thick with emotion. “And fuck you, Tommy.”

She turned to go, and the air shrieked with an incoming shell. It was louder before, and before Lizzie could turn her face up to the sky to try to track its trajectory Tommy had yanked her back to him, pressed her against the ambulance, and covered her body with his. 

The explosion, when it came, was deafening. Lizzie could feel her heart pounding in her temples, and could feel Tommy’s chest expanding and contracting against hers, but she couldn’t hear it- for a few long seconds Lizzie’s world was the blue of Tommy’s eyes and the ringing in her ears. 

Distantly, she heard herself say, “Tommy, I’m fine.” 

He shuddered, and before he pulled away he grazed his lips over the place where her neck curved into her shoulder. He moved quickly enough that it could have been accidental, but Lizzie suspected it wasn’t. 

“Come on,” he said, taking her by the elbow and steering her onto the dark road. “I’ll take you back where you belong.”

Lizzie shook him off. “I got here just fine. I can walk myself back.”

Tommy grabbed her arm and slid his rough palm all the way down to her wrist, which he hung onto tightly. “I’m walking you, Lizzie.”

“Oh, it’s Lizzie now, is it?” she asked, rounding on him. “It’s not ‘Miss Stark’? Or that whore who won’t leave your man alone?” 

Tommy’s nostrils flared and he practically dragged her off the dark road back up the command camp. 

“Do not fucking say that,” he said, his eyes gone nearly colorless with fury. “This has nothing to fucking do with Alfie. You think I care that he likes you, eh? Think I care that you pant over his cock? I don’t give a fuck. That’s what this is, Lizzie. I’m going to live through this bloody war, and then I’m going to go home, and I’m going to make something of my fucking family. We’re going to be respected.”

Lizzie looked at Tommy’s face, at his half-clenched fists, and the tension that vibrated through his angular body.  _ Respected,  _ Lizzie thought.  _ Or feared.  _

“I’m not trying to stop you,” said Lizzie, trying to keep her voice even and de-escalate the situation. “I just wanted to let you know that your  _ friend  _ was still alive.”

A muscle worked in Tommy’s jaw. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s go see him.”

They walked back up the gentle slope, and at first Lizzie didn’t realize that the noise she was hearing was thunder- but it was, and lightning was beginning to illuminate the low cloud cover along with the occasional flash of heavy artillery. 

Fifty yards from the hospital tent rain began to fall in heavy, fat drops. Tommy took her hand again and together they broke into a run. 

“I should have said that,” he called as they sprinted along. “I don’t- you’re the kind of girl someone should marry. But it can’t be me.” 

Lizzie understood the rest, all the things he didn’t say. He couldn’t marry a girl who’d been a whore, a girl who wouldn’t help the family gain ‘respectability’. She’d known that no good man would ever marry her; she’d had to accept that the first time she’d opened her legs, but oh- from Tommy, it hurt. 

Lizzie put a hand to his chest to stop him from ducking into the hospital. “You’re the one who assumed I’d want marrying,” she said coldly. “I never asked.”

Tommy raised one sleek brow. “You wouldn’t have?”

Lizzie gave him her sweetest smile. “What made you think I would?” 

She swept into the tent before him, ignoring how her hair was plastered to her head and the way her shoes squelched on her feet. 

The ward was quiet when Tommy followed her inside. Only about half of the beds were full, and it seemed only Alfie was awake. He lifted his head up and furrowed his brows. “Fucking hell,” he mumbled. “Where have you two been?” 

* * *

"No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, _This Side of Paradise_


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Previously on Because We’re Here_  
>  Alfie comes into Lizzie’s hospital with a bad leg wound. She respects his request to keep his leg, but as predicted he gets a terrible fever. Tommy comes to see Alfie and acts like an utter dick. Still, when Alfie’s fever breaks Lizzie walks down to the relief camp to let Tommy know. A shell goes off, and he covers Lizzie against the side of an ambulance. When she asks why he’s acting so odd he gives her a whole speech about how he won’t marry her, blah blah blah. Lizzie, queen, gets the last word in with, “Who said I wanted marrying?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm alive! Thank you for everyone who checked in with me during my long disappearance :) Hopefully people out there still want to read this story.  
> Also: this chapter is porn.

When the days of rejoicing are over,  
When the flags are stowed safely away,  
They will dream of another wild 'War to End Wars'  
And another wild Armistice day.

But the boys who were killed in the trenches,  
Who fought with no rage and no rant,  
We left them stretched out on their pallets of mud  
Low down with the worm and the ant.  
\--Excerpt from _Armistice Day_ , Robert Graves

* * *

**November 11, 1918**

**Outside Amiens, France.**

The war spun on like a child’s top: hopping and rattling and spinning, spinning, spinning; wobbling this way and that, but not stopping. Not yet. The war had started seemingly overnight, but the end… it seemed the end would never come. Maybe this was life now: banishment from all that was familiar and good, punishment for sins unknown. 

There were still a few souls in hospital, but few had the type of wounds Lizzie had grown so used to. Gone were the bullets and shrapnel. Now the men had the flu, or frostbite, or bad cases of creeping gangrene. Autumn was wet in eastern France, and most of the men still wore the boots they’d been issued more than four years previously. 

In the distance, the echoes of shellfire carried on the wind. 

Lizzie stood in the flap of the hospital tent, watching the horizon. It was a clear autumn day: the sun was high and weak, the breeze was cold, and the air smelled of damp soil and dark, buried things. She hugged her uniform cardigan more tightly around herself as behind her, one of the injured soldiers muttered, “Two minutes.”

A hush fell across the deeply rutted street of the Fourth Army’s command encampment, only broken by the soft thuds of two soldiers jogging along the verge. Across from the hospital tent was the mess, and the cooks and dish boys were also huddled in the entrance to their canvas domain, their faces turned to the west. 

Alfie and Tommy came to a stop by Lizzie, their cheeks pink with the cold and their run. “I worried you wouldn’t make it,” she said, leaning against Tommy’s chest as he pulled her into a hug. He smelled like mud and cigarettes and cordite smoke. Lizzie wondered if the smell would ever wash out. 

“One minute,” said MacIntyre behind them, his voice low and urgent. 

“Wouldn’t miss it, love,” said Alfie, shrugging out of his heavy woolen officers coat and draping it around Lizzie’s shoulders. None of them cared anymore if people knew about their odd relationship, whatever it was. It couldn’t matter here, at the end of all things. 

Bracketed between the warm bulk of Tommy and Alfie, Lizzie turned her face west. That way lay home, that way lay the future, whatever it was. The breeze stung at her face, and the watery sun hurt her eyes, and— and— 

And the guns stopped. Beneath the cathedral of the open sky, standing on the hallowed ground of a thousand men’s early graves, the guns finally stopped. Silence filled the space: there was no burning bush, no voice on the wind, and yet something holy filled the world anyway. The baptism of sweat and blood and tears, the purification of pain, the righteous determination of a generation of men and women who would never be the same. 

“Ten,” said MacIntyre, and Lizzie reached for Tommy’s hand, and Alfie’s, and knew she gripped them both too tightly. 

“Nine.” More men shuffled out of the telegraph building and commanders’ offices.

“Eight.” Remaining indoors wouldn’t change anything, but somehow they were all driven by an instinctual need to face this future out under the open sky, where so many men had lived and died for a war that was meant to end all thoughts of another even happening. 

“Seven.” Tommy was squeezing her hand back, his blunt fingers locked around the tired bones of her own. 

“Six.” A lone bird flew overhead, coasting on the wind that came in off the ocean, even this far from the sea. 

“Five.” Did the world look different to birds? Or could the damage of war be seen even from a thousand feet?

“Four.” Sudden panic gripped Lizzie, that everything was changing or maybe it might not; what if they’d come so close only to fail now?

“Three.” Lizzie leaned into Alfie, and he tilted his head to rest on her own. 

“Two.” She could barely remember her life before the war. She couldn’t imagine what would come after. 

“One.”

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, in a sea of silence, with faces raised to the weak autumn sun, the war ended. Not with a scream or a shout or a bang, but with peace. A tiny, unremarkable moment of perfect, incandescent tranquility that stood in the face of everything that had come before. 

The world changed— but mainly, it didn’t. A car rattled up the road, the door the telegraph office clicked closed behind the workers, and those in the beds behind Lizzie still needed tending. Functionally, only two things were different: the absence of artillery fire, and the presence of hope. 

Alfie turned and pulled Lizzie into him, even as Tommy pressed himself to her back. Alfie kissed her chastely, a gentle rasp of chapped lips on hers and three-day scruff on her chin, and then she was being turned to Tommy so he could kiss her as well. 

Lizzie sighed in acceptance, and clung to her two boys, and then quietly returned to work. 

~~~

By unspoken agreement, they were waiting for her when she got off. The war had been over for hours, and yet bandages still needed to be changed and men needed to be fed and orders needed to be followed and delivered. The war, which had started without real cause or warning, had too much momentum to stop. 

Tommy was waiting for her outside the hospital, slouched against the side of an empty ambulance with a cigarette hanging off his lip. She walked over to him and kissed him, leaning her body weight into his, tasting the ashes and hellfire of his mouth. It shouldn’t have been comforting, but then— in a perfect world, none of this would have happened at all.

“We’ve found a spot,” said Tommy, stroking one hand down Lizzie’s back, his fingertips tracing the bumps of her spine. 

“Not my tent,” said Lizzie quietly. She didn’t need to ask what he was talking about: their relationship, whatever it was, had been building towards this day since they’d met outside of Étaples two years previously. When they consummated whatever it was they had between them, she didn’t want it to be in the stained, army-issue tent that had been her home for too long. 

“Not your tent,” Tommy agreed, and then he took her hand in his. They walked along in the twilight for a few minutes, each of them smoking and content to quietly think their own thoughts. Lizzie hoped that when she remembered the end, the Armistice, the coming of peace, that she would remember it like this: the burn of tobacco in her lungs, a warm hand wrapped around her own, and piercing white-blue eyes shining in the fading light of the very last day of the war to end all wars. 

They walked as the twilight thickened, and the breeze turned from cool to cold. Tommy shrugged out of his coat and wrapped it over her, and Lizzie found herself wondering if she could take it back with her, the smell of him that, in her hindbrain, had become synonymous with safety. 

Alfie was waiting for them about a mile outside of camp.

There was a little copse of trees along a thin, quickly moving stream. A fire had been lit along the bank, and Alfie sat by it, staring into the flames, those broad shoulders of his made to look even wider in the harsh shadows. 

Tommy whistled, and Alfie looked up, wariness giving way to welcome on the hard planes of his face. 

“Been making a man wait, love,” he said, pulling Lizzie in for a hug. “Bad fucking form, you know that?” 

Tommy ducked inside a canvas lean-to he’d strung between two trees. Three sides were open, but the windward edge of the canvas sheet had been staked into the ground. He reappeared quickly, and passed Lizzie a flask that was still warm to the touch. 

“Tea,” he said, sliding into the space behind Lizzie and bracketing her with his legs. She leaned back and closed her eyes, and—

Coughed. “There’s more than tea in this,” she said, and took another swig. 

Tommy filched it from her fingers and took a swallow himself. “We have to keep you warm,” he said, pressing his cheek to hers as he passed the flask back. 

“Just listen to ‘im,” said Alfie, poking at the fire. “Spends months glaring like his face is made of rock, right, and then he breaks out the gypsy fucking charm. Surprised me out of my socks.”

“Surprised you out of more than your socks,” said Tommy, and both Lizzie and Alfie laughed. 

“He really did,” said Alfie, smiling over at them. “Charmed me into this, too. See, my people do not do well wandering in the wilderness. I have a hereditary prejudice against fucking tents.”

“Then don’t fuck tents,” said Lizzie, deadpan. “Try fucking _in_ them, instead.”

Alfie wagged a finger at Lizzie, and she felt the warmth of the tea, and the fire, and the presence of her men spread through her like cream through coffee. 

“You think you’re so clever, do you?” Alfie said, leaning over Tommy’s knee to scruff his cheek against Lizzie’s. “Do you kiss your sainted mother with that mouth?”

“No,” said Lizzie, digging her fingers into Tommy’s thigh to balance her as she leaned into Alfie. “But I might kiss you with it.”

“C’mere,” said Alfie, and finally they were kissing, and Lizzie could melt into it like snow into warm ground. They’d kissed before, back and forth and around and around, but always with the knowledge that they could be caught at any time. Now she could luxuriate, could wrap both of her arms around Alfie’s neck and arch herself against him. He was always so warm, and the short-cropped hair along the nape of his neck was soft beneath her fingertips. 

He kissed her… oh, he kissed her like the enchanted girl she’d never been. Like he’d wanted to kiss her for so long, and would be content to kiss and kiss her forever, that just their mouths and mingled breaths could be enough. Like they were innocents, both of them, wiped clean. 

With Alfie’s hand still tangled in her hair, Lizzie broke the kiss and turned back to Tommy, twisting so that she was kneeling over his hips and rocking against the bulge of his trousers. She’d wanted this for so long, since that kiss in Flanders, and then again since he’d pinned her up against the side of an ambulance. 

_Tonight will be enough,_ she told herself, melting into Tommy’s rough kisses and enjoying the sting of his teeth. _Tonight is forever, and this is all there is the world._ Their hands and mouths and warmth would be all she needed; water and food and air. 

Tommy’s hand fisted in her hair and yanked her head back, making her jaw jut up towards the cloudless sky. “Stop thinking,” he told her, shaking his hand a little to make his point. “You’re with _me._ You’re with _him._ Ours, Lizzie. Tonight, this is ours.”

Lizzie squashed the pang that shot through her at that: the joy of belonging, and the pain of it only being temporary. Instead she kissed Tommy back, making it hurt, making it _count._

“I want you,” she said, panting down into Tommy’s face before glancing over at Alfie. “Both of you. Properly.”

“Nothing proper about it, darling, nothing proper at all,” said Alfie, running one broad hand up her side before cupping her breast through her sweater and dress and shift. “Just like us.”

Thick forearms banded across her belly and tugged her back from Tommy, and Lizzie couldn’t help but wriggle. “Fuck, would you look at that?” Alfie asked, pressing his face into the shadow of Lizzie’s throat and breathing deeply. “Wants your cock so fucking bad she’ll fight for it, mate.”

Tommy’s eyes, dark with lust, flicked from Lizzie’s face to Alfie’s and back again. 

“But we can’t make this too easy now, no we can’t,” he continued, tugging Lizzie to her feet and keeping his arm tight across her belly. It was reassuring in a thrilling sort of way, knowing these men could pick her up and shift her around as though she was a toy. 

“Boots,” said Alfie, dragging her back to the present. She toed at her much scuffed boots, but Tommy’s fingers were faster, tugging at the laces and yanking the worn leather from her feet. 

“Wish I could see the next bit,” said Alfie, even as Tommy’s rough hands were sliding up her calves to pull at her garters. “I’d have you in silk and lace, love,” said Alfie. “Not red. Too fucking cliche, too pretty for red. Purple, maybe.”

“Her skin is better than silk,” came Tommy’s voice, muffled slightly by the material of her skirt. “She’s so fucking soft, Alfie.” Lizzie shivered in Alfie’s arms as Tommy’s hands slid up her thighs and around to cup her soft cunt through the worn fabric of her pants. 

His voice was lower when he added, “And _wet._ ” 

And then, in a rush of motion and cool air, Tommy yanked on her knickers and they slid down her legs as smoothly as that road paved with good intentions. 

Lizzie was nearly shaking with stoked embarrassment and flaming want. Tommy was kneeling in front of her, one of his hands up her skirt and stroking gently up and down her thigh, when he asked, “I guess you want to do your favorite thing?” 

She almost asked what he was talking about when Alfie rasped _“Yes.”_ The unabashed lust in his voice had her turning to look at him, and then he was kissing her again while those big fingers cleverly and quickly worked at the buttons of her uniform dress. It was all Lizzie could do to clench her fingers in the material of his shirt and hang on. 

Her dress quickly fell, followed by Alfie’s shirt, and then Tommy yanked her shift up and over her head and she was naked, her skin glowing red and pink this close to the fire, and she felt a little bit like Eve, fresh to the garden: comfortable with her nudity, and uncaring of any sin. 

“You,” said Alfie slowly, stroking two fingertips down the valley between her breasts and over the smooth plane of her stomach, “Are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Tommy huffed what sounded like a laugh, and Alfie’s eyes crinkled in a grin. “Look, mate, what you’ve got is some kind of eerie fucking perfection, alright? The succubi want to look like you. Lizbet here’s a fucking angel.”

Tommy’s lips skimmed over Lizzie’s shoulder blade, and then he was pressed against her and kissing Alfie again. Lizzie sighed, held up by the unlikely men she’d found here, beyond the end of the world, and couldn’t believe her luck. 

“Patient girl, aren’t you?” asked Alfie when Tommy had pulled away, rustling around inside the blanket nest they’d formed in the little lean-to. 

“I try to be,” said Lizzie, going on her tiptoes to press herself against him again. He was so sturdy, so solidly made, and it felt so _good_ for her to lean against him and know that he could support her for a while. (It felt good for someone else to be in charge of her odd and solitary life for a handful of minutes; better than any benediction.)

“Down you go,” said Alfie, pressing her to her knees. 

She licked at the head of his cock, sure that that’s where this was going, and Alfie hissed, his fingers momentarily tightening on her shoulder. “Fucking hell, love. No, back to Tommy. Good girl.”

Tommy was propped up with his back to one of the tree trunks and his legs splayed. He arranged Lizzie up against him with her back to his chest, and when she naturally closed her legs he tsked, caught her ankles with his, and swept her legs open. 

Lizzie blushed, aware that all her secret, soft places were on display for Alfie to see. 

He was certainly looking. He swallowed hard as he crawled into the little shelter after them, and kept right on crawling until his face was level with her pussy and Lizzie felt like her cheeks might burst into flame. 

“You,” he announced grandly, “Are water in the desert. A miracle, unto God’s chosen few.”

 _“Two,”_ Tommy muttered. 

“Two,” Alfie amended before leaning over and biting Tommy’s thigh. It must hurt, or at least surprise Tommy, because he grunted and twitched, and when Alfie lifted his face away he was wearing a smug expression and Tommy was wearing his teeth marks. 

“Fucker,” Tommy muttered, but not in a particularly angry way. 

“Right,” said Alfie, settling in again between Lizzie’s splayed legs. “Where was I?” 

Lizzie made a smothered, almost whimpering noise when Alfie started, incredibly delicately, nibbling his way up the inside of one thigh. 

“Hush,” said Tommy, stroking her from shoulder to elbow with one heavy hand. “It’s good. He’s good at this. Relax.”

Alfie taunted her, nuzzling against her thighs, nosing into her folds, and ignoring the way she rocked her hips into him, hoping that he’d come closer, touch her at least. 

“Wait,” said Tommy, cupping one of her breasts before toying with the nipple, rolling it this way and that between two fingers. 

That little spot of pain only made her more needy. “Please,” she asked Alfie, her voice high and breathy. 

“Please, she asks me,” he said, scraping his teeth down the crease where thigh met body. “So fucking polite. What d’you think, Tom?”

“We can take our time later,” said Tommy. 

Lizzie only had a moment to wonder if they’d talked about this between themselves; plotted all the ways they would touch and torture her, because Alfie parted her folds with his fingers, settled heavily between her thighs, and finally, _finally_ touched her. 

It was slow at first. Of course it was. He traced her with his fingers and kitten licked over her anatomy like he was exploring, or settling in for a long meal with many courses to sample. Lizzie didn’t know if she’d ever been this wet before; it seemed like she should be wet right down her thighs, but Alfie’s tongue was clever and warm, and Tommy’s hands were grounding, and she was being forced to exist in this moment, in this body, and absorb all the pleasure they found fit to give her. 

“Tight,” Alfie muttered into her cunt, not bothering to look up from his work. He had one finger inside her, and it was more than Lizzie had taken since volunteering. That small intrusion felt so good and like not enough. 

“Yeah?” Tommy asked, sliding one hand down over her belly to hold her hips down to the padded ground. “Gonna feel so good. You’ll feel so god around my cock, Lizzie girl.” 

Lizzie whimpered and squirmed, turning her face up for a kiss. _They had more plans for her._ Alfie was pleasuring her with his mouth— which nobody had done, nobody wanted to eat out a whore— and then _Tommy Shelby was going to fuck her._

Tommy obliged, messily kissing her cockeyed and upside down, but Lizzie was well beyond caring. Her whole body felt sensitized, and her long-ignored clit throbbed between her legs like a second heartbeat. 

“Please,” Lizzie chanted over and over. “Please.”

They seemed to know what she wanted. Tommy anchored her more firmly against him and cupped her throat with his free hand. She was trapped between them, held open like a captive feast, wanted and touched and petted. She didn’t have to fend for herself here. 

Lizzie gave herself over to it. 

She shouted when Alfie finally laved the flat of his tongue over her clit, giving her the pressure and stimulation she’d so desperately needed, and after that she didn’t bother to think anymore. He had another finger inside her, slipping incrementally back and forth in time with his tongue, and now that Alfie had finally decided to make her come her gave her no quarter. ‘

He drove her up, far past the point of pure pleasure, up to the place where her cunt almost _hurt_ in its need, but the agony would only grow if she didn’t get to come, and come soon. Still, Alfie didn’t let up, didn’t slow his pace, and Lizzie could feel the muscles in her belly twitching under Tommy’s forearm. Her legs were shaking, and she could distantly hear moans and sobs falling from her mouth like tiny wordless prayers. 

With a final rock of his shoulders and press of his tongue (and jesus christ, he fucked her with the whole of his body, didn’t he?) Alfie tipped her over the edge into oblivion. Pleasure suffused her, she was drowning in it, deaf to the world and everything in it except the smell of sex and smoke and their hands on her body, her body which was twitching and shaky with release. 

“Alfie,” Lizzie muttered, prying her eyes open and looking down the plane of her body at Alfie, who was still splayed between her legs. His cheek was pressed to her lower belly, and he was smirking up at her with a soaked face and a smug expression. 

“You’ve ruined me for it, Lizbet,” he said, pressing up to his knees and grabbing his discarded shirt, which he used to wipe his face. “The way your tits flush, and your back arches. So pretty when you come. I’ll have to do it again.”

“C’mere,” said Lizzie, reaching for him. Alfie obliged, and kissed her with all the delicacy she would never expect from a man like him. She could taste herself on him, and it was so dirty and generous and wrong that Lizzie found herself clinging to him, digging her nails the skin of his shoulders. 

“Now now,” said Alfie, pulling away to hover over her. “We can’t leave Tom out in the cold, right? Up we go, there’s a girl.”

Still loose and trembly, Alfie pulled Lizzie up and turned her in Tommy’s lap, arranging her like a little doll over Tommy’s hips. She felt like a toy, a beloved pet, maybe, being stroked and arranged and praised like this. 

Lizzie leaned into Tommy, wrapping her arms loosely around his neck, and gave him a gentle kiss. “Thank you, too,” she said, bumping his nose with hers. 

Tommy’s hands tightened on her waist. “I can think of a way you can thank me.”

Lizzie makes a happy humming noise, and Alfie snorts. “Cockstands make you mean, mate.”

“Not mean,” said Lizzie, grinding against the bulge she can feel against Tommy’s left trouser leg. “He knows what he wants.”

One of Tommy’s hands flies up to fist in her hair, tugging her head back again, and the other delicately traced a line from her pulse point to one hard nipple, which he circled slowly. “Fucking perfect, aren’t you. Fucking perfect for me.”

Lizzie only shivered, overwhelmed by the afterglow of her orgasm and the dull sting of Tommy’s fist in her hair. She didn’t need to answer. If he declared her perfect, then she would be. 

Tommy’s gaze jumped from her to Alfie. “Condom,” he said, jerking his head towards his discarded coat. Alfie snagged it while Tommy pushed Lizzie down to his knees, fumbling at his belt and trousers. 

The little packet landed in his lap, and Tommy was rolling it on while Alfie braced himself behind Lizzie, warm and solid. Somehow there was no embarrassment here, with three bodies in play. It felt right. 

Alfie helped her sink onto Tommy’s cock, and she was so wet there was hardly a stretch. Tommy hissed, rocking up into her, and Lizzie wrigged, splaying one hand low between her hips. “So _full,”_ she said, voice low, and Tommy growled. 

“Good lord,” Alfie muttered, sprawled out beside them. “Fucking look at you.”

Tommy ignored him. He grabbed Lizzie hips, just this side of too tight, and started slowly dragging her forward and back, forward and back, working his cock up into her as she ground against his pubic bone on the downstroke. 

He looked so fierce like that, with the muscles in his shoulders bunching and his jaw set and his eyes hot and locked on hers. It only took a few minutes before Lizzie felt warm arousal growing in her belly again, and she started moving more quickly, using the muscle in her thighs to propel her against him a little harder, a little more quickly.

Alfie had just made her orgasm, and now she was going to come on Tommy’s cock, and both of the men still had their trousers and boots on while Lizzie was as naked as god made her. It felt entirely wrong and deeply, completely right. This was where she wanted to belong, held safe and warm in the middle of her soldier boys. 

She could feel sweat beading along her skin, and Tommy’s face had gone lust-blown and a little bit mean; entirely focused on the pleasure that Lizzie had hiding inside her. His cock felt so good inside her, filling what was empty, but— 

“Tom,” she said, curling a little so she could rest her forehead on his, their breaths panted between them. “I need— it’s not—” 

“I know,” he said, sliding one arm up from her hip to cup her shoulder, grinding her down where she was impaled by his body. “I know, Lizzie girl, c’mon.”

Lizzie’s thighs were burning, and her cunt ached and hungered all at the same time, and she couldn’t get enough air, like she was downing in his lust-blown eyes, and— 

And he slid a hand down her sweat-damp belly to get two fingers on her clit, his wrist bent at a nearly impossible angle, and that was what she needed, his fingers insistently chasing her as she rocked harder on his cock. The air smelled of sweat and sex and _home,_ and Lizzie would take all of it, the pleasure and pain and thirst, if only she could stay in this moment forever. 

“Come _on,_ ” Tommy growled, leaning into her and sinking his teeth into the curve where her neck met shoulder. 

Lizzie bucked against him and came again, her cunt clenching around his cock while the muscles in her legs went limp and useless with released tension. Tommy thrust up into her rapidly, his abdominals clenching, and he followed her over with his teeth still worrying her skin and his grunts loud in her ear. 

For a few hundred heartbeats she stayed there in his lap, slumped against him, while his fingers slowly traced up and down her spine. 

“Fuck,” he mutted quietly, pressing a dry kiss to the skin of her shoulder. “Are you alright?” 

“Mmm,” Lizzie hummed, turning her face on his shoulder so she could smile at Alfie. 

“Looks alright to me, mate,” said Alfie. He was laying on his side, propping up his head with one hand while the other slowly stroked his cock. 

“Alfie,” said Lizzie, voice slightly slurred from pleasure and exhaustion. “Needs a turn.”

“I”ll get ‘im,” said Tommy, shifting Lizzie off of his lap and tying off the condom. He used Alfie’s now-filthy shirt to clean off his cock before tucking himself back into his trousers. 

Lizzie took a few long breaths before scooting across the blanket to Alfie. 

“Hello Lizbet,” he said, cuddling her close and giving her one of those slow, deep kisses that made her toes curl and her fingers clench against him. “You look pleased with yourself.”

“I want you to use me,” Lizzie whispered, nearly nose to nose with Alfie as they lay sprawled on the blankets. “Not Tommy.”

A delicious little shiver went through her, slightly amazed at her own shameless bravery. She wanted Alfie to move inside her, fucking her pleasure-wet cunt, the one he’d kissed so thoroughly, the one Tommy had just finished using himself. 

“You’re all wrung out,” said Alfie, smoothing a sweat-dampened lock of hair off her forehead. “And Tom’s not half bad with that silver fucking tongue of his.”

“Me,” said Lizzie insistently, undulating against him. 

Her pussy stroked over the head of Alfie’s swollen cock, and he hissed, his hips chasing hers seemingly without conscious thought. 

“Alright,” he said, rolling her onto her back and making a space for himself between her thighs. “Aren’t you a good girl.” 

Lizzie wrapped her legs loosely around Alfie’s waist, and he helped her hitch them higher. Tommy tossed him another condom, and when he rocked into her it was nearly frictionless. She was still so wet and messy, and these men had made her that way, and she loved them. 

Alfie worked into her slowly, letting her feel every inch of his cock as he worked her with solid thrusts. Lizzie smiled up at him, so happy she’d found them, not caring that she probably looked fuck-drunk and foolish. 

“Aren’t you precious,” said Alfie, sliding his forearms under her back so he could cup her shoulders. When he thrust into her he was rocking her body into his own hands, and she was caged in and covered by him. She loved it. 

“Look at what Tommy did, fucking animal,” said Alfie, dropping his head to kiss the purpling bite mark where Tommy’s teeth had sunk into her shoulder. “Marking you up.”

“I like it,” said Lizzie, tightening her legs around his waist. She wouldn’t come again, but it felt so nice to have him inside her. She felt full and connected and wanted, and wished she could go on feeling that way. 

Air hissed between Alfie’s teeth at that, and his hips finally broke their measured rhythm, grinding into her harshly. “Fuck, princess. Don’t say that.”

“It’s true,” said Lizzie, leaning up to brush her lips against his. “It’s proof that. That he wanted me so much.”

Alfie groaned, lowered his head to the curve of her breast and sucked in a mouthful of skin. It was more painful this way, without the pounding bliss of orgasm to distract her, but when Alfie raised his head there it was, a blooming burgundy-colored mark of his own. 

“You’ll be the death of us both,” said Alfie, kissing her again, messy and hard. 

“Put you back together afterwards,” said Lizzie, grinning. 

Alfie smiled and huffed and rocked into her until she could feel his control waning, and patience blowing away like clouds over the sea. She urged him on this, with her heels digging into his back and her soft love-words in his ear. He came with a muffled groan, shuddering against her, and when he lowered down to rest his weight on her Lizzie sighed happily and wrapped her arms and legs around him more tightly. 

“I like this,” said Lizzie, half asleep and most of the way to being in love. “Like being with you two. And you’re so _warm.”_

The night had continued to cool, and the sweat Lizzie had worked up with Tommy had dried, leaving her exhausted and chilled. 

Alfie finally pressed off of her, leaving with a soft, closed-mouth kiss. “Miracle. That’s what you are. Fucking miracle.”

He levered off her and stumbled out of their shelter. Tommy had apparently been waiting for this: he dragged her up into a sitting positon, dragged her shift over her head, and passed her his canteen. 

“Water,” he said, propping her up against his side. “Drink.”

Lizzie did, sipping slowly, enjoying the way Tommy dragged the blankets around her into a proper bed. “So fucking perfect,” he repeated, mostly to himself. “Just perfect.” 

That statement was punctuated with a soft kiss to her temple, and Lizzie wished she was awake enough to tell him thank you.

By the time Alfie got back, Tommy was curled with his back to the canvas with Lizzie in his arms. Alfie was able to lift the blankets and slide in on Lizzie’s other side, bracketing her in.

She felt… safe, she decided. Safe, and warm, and wanted. 

It couldn’t make the rest worth the price. This one perfect night couldn’t wipe out everything that had come before. But these two men had given her something that she wanted to remember; a memory to turn to whenever the nightmares would inevitably come. 

On the first night of everything that would come after, Lizzie and Tommy and Alfie fell asleep out under the uncaring anathema of the stars. 

* * *

I cannot tell  
What time your life became mine:  
Perhaps when one summer night  
We halted on the roadside  
In the starlight only,   
And you sang your sad home-songs,   
Dirges which I, standing outside your soul  
Coldly condemned. 

I cannot tell  
What time your life became mine:  
Perhaps, one night, descending cold,   
When rum was mightily acceptable,   
And my doling gave birth to sensual gratitude.  
\--Excerpt from _My Company,_ by Herbert Reads

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: Condoms were issued to British troops during WWI, but the American army resisted, saying that condoms would only encourage fornication and adultery. Honestly, that should tell you everything you need to know about how the puritans eternally fucked over their idiot descendants. (I dare my ancestors to read my absolutely filthy fanfic AND WEEP.)
> 
> Hello loves! I'm back, and working on the next chapter. I got caught up in crazy life stuff, and then I got trapped in the shame place. You know, the one where your brain tells you it's been so long since anyone heard from you that answering comments or posting a new chapter would seem crazy? Well, here I am anyway.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Previously on Because We're Here_  
>  On Armistice Day, Alfie, Tommy, and Lizzie stand by as the war to end all wars comes to a close. After that Tommy walks Lizzie out into the countryside where he and Alfie have set up a little camp. The three of them have lots of sex, and then curl up to sleep together on the first night of the rest of their lives.

**Early December, 1918**

**France.**

“Don’t.” Lizzie put a hand to Tommy’s chest, cutting off whatever it was he was getting ready to say. “Don’t say you’ll write. Don’t… make promises you won’t keep.”

His blue eyes were so bright against the steel grey sky. “I won’t forget you.”

Lizzie forced herself to smile. “That’ll have to be enough, then.”

“I wish it could be different.”

“I won’t go back to Birmingham, Tom. I can’t. And you don’t want to be seen with the neighborhood whore. I understand that. It doesn’t fit into your plan to rule Small Heath.” She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice. 

“You aren’t a whore,” he said, his voice low. “Hey- Lizzie. You aren’t. You fought in France, same as every other man here. It’s wiped it all clean.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“It’s how it should.”

Lizzie turned her face away, and watched the train engine steam into the frosty morning air. Trainload after trainload of men had been moved to the coast, where they would catch their ships home. Lizzie was here for a few days more; assigned to travel with the last of the wounded soldiers. 

“I’m sorry,” said Tommy quietly. “I wish…”

Lizzie darted forward to hug him, tucking her face into that safe, shadowed place along the side of his throat. He smelled like gunpowder and mud and cigarette smoke, and she hoped that particular combination of smells would always remind her of him. 

“Goodbye, Tommy,” she said, and then she was walking away with her shoulders straight and her head held high. 

It was a small mercy, then, that Tommy couldn’t see her tears. 

**Late December, 1918**

**Birmingham, England.**

Tommy woke to hammering on his door. (For a sticky, opium-scented moment he thought he’d awoken to the sound of pickaxes in the walls.)

“Tommy!” it was Arthur’s voice, high and worried. “Wake up, Tom. There’s a boy at the door, says he’s got a message for you.”

“Alright, Arthur,” said Tommy, swinging his head over the edge of the bed and scrubbing a palm over his face. “I’ll be down. Go back to bed.”

He pulled his suspenders up over his shoulders as he padded down the creaking stairs in his bare feet. Sure enough, Polly was standing in the open door, wrapped in her printed house coat, as a boy bounced on the balls of his feet outside. 

“It’s bad news,” said Polly, her voice low. “I felt it, when I heard the knocking.”

“Yeah, well. When someone comes calling in the middle of the night, it usually is.”

“There’s a call for you on the telly in the Post Office,” said the boy. “Someone from London needs you. A lady’s sick.”

“What lady?” asked Tommy, leaning against the doorjam and filling his lungs with the smell of home. His feet were freezing, but the coal-blackened air helped clear his mind enough to focus on the problem at hand. 

“I dunno. Jerry, he found me ‘round the back and told me to get up to Watery Lane to find Tommy Shelby and let him know that there’s a call for him from London, that his lady was sick.”

Tommy swallowed the impulse to tell the boy that he didn’t have a lady, that there’d been some mistake, and to go back to huddling in his bed like a child afraid of the dark. 

“Alright, lad,” he said. “Go on, tell Jerry I’ll be round. I’ll get me shoes and meet you down there.”

“Can I have a penny?” 

“If you come back later, Aunt Pol’ll make you breakfast. How about that.”

It must have been an alright trade, because the boy was off like a shot. 

“I didn’t know you had a girl,” said Polly from the shadows of the kitchen. Only a slow curl of cigarette smoke gave you away. 

“I don’t,” said Tommy, jogging up the stairs to dress properly. Polly followed him. “It could be a code. Curly took one of the longboats into London; something could have happened with the drop.” He’d been making inquiries in London, too, about the state of the trackside bookies. Polly didn’t need to know about that yet. 

“I’ll open the shop, tell people that you’re busy if they ask.”

“Good.” Tommy ran down the stairs, slid into his coat, and tugged his cap down over his forehead. 

It was a quick run to the Post Office, which glowed like a beacon against the gloom of the midwinter night. The side door was unlocked, and when Tommy stepped into the back part of the office, that same kid was up on the high sorting counter, kicking his heels. 

“Phone’s over there,” he said, nodding helpfully. 

He cleared his throat, picked up the receiver, and said, “Tommy Shelby speaking.”

“Sergeant-Major?”

Goosebumps prickled along the back of Tommy’s neck. 

“I’m Elise Perkins. A VAD nurse who followed the Fourth Army. We met in France, when you and Miss Stark… Lizzie’s sick. She’s really sick, and her form doesn’t have any listed next of kin, and I can’t stay with her. I knew you and Captain Solomons were …  _ close,  _ and. I didn’t know who else to call. The operator said there was a pack of Shelbys living in Birmingham, so it was my best guess.”

“Where is she?” 

Elise rattled off the name of the London hospital. “She’s in the nurse’s ward, but she can’t stay. They need to put her with the other influenza patients, but there aren’t any more beds.”

Tommy’s heart fluttered like a trapped bird, beating against the cage of his ribs. “She has the flu, then.”

“Yes,” said Elise, and he could hear the exhaustion in her voice. “Come quickly.”

**Early December, 1918**

**France.**

“I’m no good for you, love,” said Alfie. 

Lizzie leaned into his side and nestled her head on his shoulder. “Don’t I get to be the judge of that?”

“You volunteered to come to France, right, I don’t think we can consider your sense of self-preservation fucking suffient.”

“You volunteered too.”

“Right, I did. And I am a bad, bad man. I do bad things. I don’t need you in that. The Italians would eat you right up.”

“You’re feuding with the Italians? What Italians?”

“Don’t worry about it, princess.”

“What do you do, Alfie? Back in the world?” 

“I told you, love,” he said. “Bad things.”

**Late December, 1918**

**London, England.**

The hospital was eerie. Dawn still hadn’t quite broken through the fog and sleet, and the lights were dim. 

An exhausted orderly sat inside the door. Most of his face was obscured by a cloth mask. 

“You have to have a mask to visit,” said the man. 

Tommy pulled an oversized handkerchief from his pocket and tied it haphazardly around the bottom portion of his face. “I’m looking for Elise Perkins. She’s a nurse, she called me earlier.”

“She left a note,” said the orderly. “Up the stairs, third floor, back ward. She’s on duty now.” 

“Thanks,” said Tommy, already moving. 

The staircase echoed with the sound of his footfalls (shovels echoing in his head; shells echoing in Danny’s) but eventually he came out on a long, narrow hall of doors. Hand printed signs had been tacked to the doors as he passed. Each had the ward name, followed by “Influenza patients. All must wear a mask.”

Tommy shuddered. The ranks of those killed by the pandemic had joined the lists from the front. 

Ward C was at the end of the hall, and Tommy pushed open the door with trepidation. Beds lined the room, and cots had been set up head-to-toe in the center of the room. A few nurses moved among the rows, and here and there a lamp glowed, casting a little island of warm yellow light. 

“Sergeant Major?” asked one of the nurses, walking silently over to him. 

Tommy nodded. 

Nurse Perkins was thin, her dress had gone grey from frequent washings, and it was rumpled in a way that spoke of long, long hours. Her hair was a shade lighter than Lizzie’s, and she had the beginnings of wrinkles forming along her forehead and at the corner of her mouth. 

“Come on,” she said. “She isn’t here.”

Elise led him back out to the stairwell, where they climbed another two floors. The walls sloped in here, all odd angles and low ceilings dictated by the eaves of the roof. It had been turned into a dormitory of sorts, and a few beds were occupied by covered sleepers. 

Lizzie was in the corner. A screen had been put up on one side of her bed, and an IV slowly dripped through a yellow tube into her arm. Even knowing she was sick, he wasn’t prepared for the way she looked. Her dark hair was shiny with sweat and oil. Her skin was sallow, blotchy from fever, and the circles under her eyes were so deep he wondered if they’d ever go away. She was thin, even thinner than he remembered; the one hand he could see looked as delicate as a bird’s wing. 

“She can’t stay here,” said Elise, dunking a flannel in a basin and laying it over Lizzie’s forehead. “Influenza patients have to be quarantined away from the rest, but there aren’t any more beds, and…” 

The rest didn’t need to be said: And Lizzie didn’t have any family. Lizzie didn’t have anywhere to go. Lizzie wouldn’t have someone to check on her, or to make sure she was getting enough care. 

He couldn’t get her back to Birmingham like this. The car was way too cold, and the state of the roads would finish her off if the winter didn’t. Fucking hell, he was going to have to take her to Alfie. 

“Get her ready to travel,” he said. “Where should I pull the car round?” 

And then he was jogging off into the night, and trying not to think about how Lizzie had been the same color as the grey sheets beneath her fevered flush. 

~~~

“What’s the password?” Alfie called through the heavy door of his bakery, and Tommy could hear the suspicion in his voice. 

“I don’t fucking know,” said Tommy, trying hold Lizzie a little more firmly to his chest. She was light, like a hollow-boned bird, but her limbs were too long for him to gracefully hold while she was carried like this. The glass vial of her saline drip rested precariously against Lizzie’s blanket-clad chest, and if Alfie dicked around enough for her fluids to smash, Tommy would make sure Alfie’s skull followed soon after. 

“Is that you Tom?” Alfie asked. 

“I’ve got Lizzie out here, and she’s in a bad way,” said Tommy, losing his patience along with the feeling in his fingers. “Open the door.”

He heard a chain dragging through the handles, and then the big barn-style doors were sliding open. Alfie was backlit by the lanterns inside, and Tommy walked into the glare before the door had even stopped moving. 

“Lizbet,” said Alfie, leaning over Tommy. 

“I’m losing me grip, Alfie, where can I put her?” 

Alfie took her from Tommy, and she mumbled nonsense-words to herself as he did, her eyes fluttering open, but not focusing on anything that Tommy was able to see. 

Alfie strode off into the warehouse, and Tommy followed closely behind. It smelled like sugar and the cheapest rum money could buy, astringent and bitter. 

“Clean off the desk, Tom, there’s a lad,” said Alfie, as he turned into a wood-paneled office. 

Tommy shoved the phone and books to the floor, not bothering to mark any pages. 

As soon as Alfie had set Lizzie against the wood surface he was peeling back her blankets, ostensibly checking for wounds. “The fuck did you do to my girl, mate? I’d kill another man for this.”

“I didn’t do anything,” said Tommy, taking his cap off and smacking it against his thigh before jamming it back on again. “I was asleep and a lad came round and told me there was a call for me from London, and my girl was sick. Got her from the hospital by the station. Influenza. And now here we are. You were the closest place I knew.”

Alfie gave him a long, cool look before tucking the blankets back around Lizzie. Tommy flipped open his watch and saw that it was a bit after six in the morning, and still black as night outside the high bakery windows. 

“She can’t stay here long,” said Alfie, dragging over a hat stand, which he used to hang Lizzie’s IV bottle. “Men’ll be here soon, and there’s no place quiet enough for her to rest. Fucking hell, mate. What are we going to do.”

“I don’t know,” said Tommy, taking a step closer to Lizzie, watching as her brow furrowed and she shifted uncomfortably on the hard surface of the desk. “But we owe it to her.”

“I know it,” said Alfie, running the tip of his index finger over Lizzie’s flushed cheek. “I fucking know it.”

~~~

The sharp, coldness of the air was enough to rouse Lizzie back to a general awareness of herself, if not anything else that was happening. She was being carried against a broad chest, and there were streetlights glowing in the gloom, and she  _ hurt.  _ She’d hurt before, with broken fingers and angry cuts and the occasional fever, but this was something different entirely. Her bones felt like they were under pressure, warping and swelling, and everything was  _ hot.  _

“Shhh,” someone hushed, holding her a little tighter. She should be worried about that, she knew she should be, but the hands were familiar, and the rough wool of his coat smelled homey too, like something she would recognize if she thought about it for long enough. 

“Here we go, Lizbet. Here we are, yeah. Hello.”

A blurred face framed bright, grey-blue eyes. 

“‘Fie,” she croaked, swallowing around a tongue that seemed to have swollen beyond the dimensions of her mouth. 

“You’re gonna stay with me for a couple of days, sure you are. We’ll have you up and chasing me and Tom again, won’t we? We take an awful fucking lot of looking after.”

Lizzie managed to curl her fingers through the coarse hair at the nape of his neck in response before the sweltering, sweaty darkness took her under once more. 

~~~

“She’s fucking out again, Tommy,” said Alfie, laying her down in the back bedroom of his surprisingly neat flat. He lived above a jeweler's shop eight blocks from his warehouse, and Tommy would tease him about it if he didn’t have a ball of dread locked in his throat and blocking his airway. 

“She’s probably more comfortable that way,” he said, stroking Lizzie’s sweat-matted hair away from her face. 

“No, ‘s no good,” said Alfie, tugging off Lizzie’s nest of blankets before pulling a pen-knife out of his pocket, flipping it open, and cutting her sweat-sodden shift right down the middle.

“What the fuck are you doing?” asked Tommy, lunging forward out of instinct. 

“We gotta get her cooled down, mate,” said Alfie. “Heart and brain will fucking roast if we don’t. Down the hall, go run the bath.”

Tommy watched as Alfie checked Lizzie over again, apparently ignoring the way she was shivering in the cool air. 

“Go,” said Alfie, snarling it over his shoulder. 

Tommy went. The water closer was as neat as the rest of the house, and Tommy fiddled with the brass taps until a steady stream of warmish water began to fill the porcelain tub. Alfie came in then, carrying Lizzie, and without even her thin shift to cover her her skin looked papery and stretched thin. 

She stirred a little when Alfie lowered her into the water. 

“Right,” he said. “I’m off to the surgery. Know a nurse down there who owes me a favor. Keep an eye on her, and get her into bed if her fever comes down.” 

“I know what to do,” Tommy snapped, already tired of feeling helpless and out of control. At least during the war the enemy had had a face. He’d been able to hear them coming, tunneling along the walls. All Tommy could do now was fucking  _ hope.  _

(He didn’t pray. Praying was for people who weren’t already dead.) 

Alfie’s heavy footfalls padded down the hallway, and then Tommy heard the front door echo closed. “It’s just you and me, Lizzie girl,” said Tommy softly, kneeling on the hard tile by the edge of the bath. 

He was probably imagining it, but her breathing seemed a little bit easier already. Every now and then a great shiver would wrack her form, and Tommy would find himself leaning a little bit closer to her, as though his presence alone could anchor her here with him in the land of the living. 

“I hate that this is how we’re seeing each other again,” he said, pulling a soft washcloth and bar of soap off a little inset shelf. He lathered the soap, and gently ran the cloth over Lizzie’s arm with the IV, the one he kept having to fish out of the tub and lay along the edge. 

“I wanted to ...I don’t know what I fucking wanted. To come see you again. To show you that I was thinking of you, but that you couldn’t have me unless you came back to Birmingham.

“You shouldn’t care so much about what people there think of you. Fuck them. Fuck all of them, sweetheart.” 

Somewhere in the back of his head, in the voice that had always forced him to recognize the truth in front of him, Tommy realized that he was speaking a hypocrisy the size of a Mark V tank. He’d have brought her back  _ with  _ him if he wasn't so worried about being respectable; about clawing his way up and out of the gutter for the sake of his family. They were already looked down on for being Rom, for being bookmakers, for being violent and ruthless and shameless. 

If there was any family who could force the whole of Small Heath to accept Lizzie, it was his. And he hadn’t bothered. 

Tommy looked up from where he’d been playing with her fingers and noticed that her chin was precariously close to the waterline. It had been a few minutes since she’d had a shivering fit, and it looked like she was trying to curl into herself to sleep. 

“C’mon, here we go,” he muttered, sliding her higher against the back of the tub. “You can’t breathe water, Lizzie-girl. There you go.”

She blinked at him a few times before sliding back down. 

Tommy cursed quietly to himself. He’d have to get her out of the tub eventually, but she finally seemed to be in a state approaching comfort. He couldn’t bring himself to take that from her, not yet. 

(Not when life had taken everything else from her already.) 

Instead, Tommy stood, kicked off his shoes and socks, and reached for a stack of well-washed towels that had been placed along the shelf. He moved them to the sink before yanking off his jacket and waistcoat and shirt. 

This wasn’t how he’d wanted to feel Lizzie’s skin against his again. Not even fucking close. 

When he was down to nothing but his pants, Tommy gently folded Lizzie in on herself, sliding her forward in the water until he’d made a space for himself at her back. He hissed a little when he stepped into the tub. The water wasn’t hot, not like he’d have preferred, but by the time he’d gotten settled with Lizzie against his chest and his legs bracketing her on either side, her hot skin had more than made up for that fact. 

“Tommy,” said Lizzie quietly, rolling her head slowly from side to side along his sternum. 

All the hair on the back of Tommy’s neck prickled upright. “Yeah,” he said gruffly before clearing his throat. “Yeah, it’s me.” 

Her fingers fluttered in the water, creating little ripples and disjointed fractures of light that made her pretty, long-fingered hands look broken. 

He  _ hated  _ this. Hated that someone who’d been only an unstoppable force for comfort and good had been brought low like this. He shouldn’t  _ ever  _ be someone’s last resort. It was the saddest thing in a world of cruel unfairness. A Watery Lane gypsy as this good woman’s last fucking hope. 

Jesus. 

“Miss you,” said Lizzie, her voice thin and quiet. 

Tommy stroked her sticky forehead, and then reached for the rinse jug sitting in the corner. Maybe he could wash her hair for her. Ada swore that after she’d been ill, the only thing to make her feel human again was to wash the sweat out of her hair. 

‘I don’t feel good,” said Lizzie in a small voice as Tommy gently worked soap into the roots of her now-damp hair. 

“I know,” he said, not recognizing his own voice. He needed Alfie to come back  _ now;  _ he needed Alfie to come back and save him from this terrible intimacy between him and Lizzie. He wasn’t her lover, not her husband, nothing that they could name beyond friendship. Theirs had been a foxhole romance, and they’d left the trenches behind. 

_ Have you?  _ A little voice asked.  _ Or did your soul stay there? In the mud, in the dark, with the shovels at the wall?  _

He couldn’t leave Lizzie there as well.

“We’ll get you patched up,” said Tommy, trying to let himself relax into that soft-voiced place he went to with the horses. “Get you well, get you some rest. Let us spoil you, eh? Silk slips, and pretty French soaps. I’d say I’d cook for you, but if anyone could burn soup, I’d find a way to do it.”

He couldn’t tell if Lizzie was awake and listening to him, but every so often he’d see her fingers twitch under the water. He shifted the back of her head to the divot between his collarbone and shoulder, and then used one hand to block rinse water from running soap down from her hair and into her eyes. 

“I used to like this,” he said quietly. At this point he was talking more to himself than to Lizzie, but that was alright. Finding something to say kept him from panicking about whether Lizzie would fight this off, or if she’d slowly fade away onto one of the long, endless lists of the dead. 

“I used to like tending to things. In France…” Tommy took a deep breath, and slowly ran his hand down Lizzie’s damp arm. “In France it only fucking hurt. The horses died, the men died, the Pals Battalions were broken up and moved from army to army.”

Tommy huffed, and leaned forward to press his cheek to Lizzie’s. “Who am I telling, eh? You must have made friends with the men you treated. Who died. There’s been so much death, Lizzie girl. Let’s live, eh.”

Tommy peered down into Lizzie’s face, hoping to see a flicker of life there. She was sleeping, her breath even and raspy, and with so much of her skin against his Tommy could tell her fever was down, but still burning. 

He heard Alfie’s boots thumping down the hall, and hugged Lizzie more tightly to him reflexively. 

One of Alfie’s wild eyebrows rose when he stopped in the doorway of the little water closet, radiating the cold of late December from the folds of his heavy black coat. “You’re lucky I fucking know you mate, else I might just get the wrong idea, wouldn’t I?” 

Tommy scowled and jerked his head towards the stack of towels. “Open one up, wouldn’t you?”

Alfie shucked his coat and rolled up his shirtsleeves before scooping Lizzie up and holding her in a standing position in the tub, letting Tommy step out from behind her. 

“She kept slipping down into the water,” said Tommy. “And she seemed so much more comfortable in the tub.”

“I didn’t say nothing now, did I?” asked Alfie, swaddling Lizzie in towels before carrying her back to the bedroom. Tommy kicked off his clammy pants before jerking on his trousers and shirt and following them. 

Lizzie’s IV line had wrigged about with them dragging her all over half of London. Alfie wrapped a fresh piece of gauze over it before placing Lizzie’s hand over her gaunt, blanket-clad belly. “Rachel will stop by on her way home from the surgery to check on Lizzie and change out her fluids. And I got some aspirin,” said Alfie, digging the glass bottle out of his pocket and setting it by the lamp. “Rachel swears by the stuff. She said we needed to get some food into her with ‘em.”

“Fuck,” said Tommy, running a hand over his short-shorn hair. 

~~~

Her fever burned steadily for three days. Rachel came by to change Lizzie’s saline drip, and to provide any encouragement she could. Her fever burned hotter around midnight, no matter how the day had gone, and Tommy found himself propping her up in the bath again, while Alfie crouched on the other side of the tub and watched them with exhaustion in his eyes. 

“How did she do this?” he asked as the clock in the hall ticked towards one, and a slushy snow fell outside the windows. “How the fuck did Lizzie treat all those men, treat  _ us,  _ and not become a bottle-loving, bitter old broad?”

“She didn’t love them,” said Tommy, tilting his head back so it could rest against the tiled bath enclosure. 

“And you do?” 

Tommy opened his eyes and looked over at Alfie: his Captain, his friend, his foxhole lover. Alfie’s face was so familiar— the broad planes of his cheekbones, the dark scruff, the grey-green eyes, and his oddly pouty lips. He looked pale and tired, but that was familiar, too. 

_ Did he love Lizzie?  _

“You don’t?” he asked quietly. 

~~~

Lizzie woke, and the sun was streaming in the window. Her head ached, her mouth was dry and tasted bitter and rotten, and she felt… whole. Not well, but not like she was going to be crushed under the weight of her own body, either. 

Slowly, listening to her skin rustle over the sheets, Lizzie rolled her head to the side. Alfie was curled on his side facing her, with his dark eyelashes fanned over his cheeks and the fingertips of one hand bruising against her blanket-covered hip. She vaguely remembered seeing him before this, and part of him had been convinced it was a dream. 

She knew she remembered Tommy. He’d talked to her in the darkness, when she wept and her own tears burning in the cracked skin of her dry lips. He’d whispered for hours, his voice low and rough, about things he’d seen and hopes he harbored still. 

His voice had been a tether when she’d drifted, ensuring that she could always find her way back. Alfie’s hands and Tommy’s voice, and endless, endless patience. 

Slowly she turned to look the other way and saw Tommy laying on the floor with his head on a cross-stitched pillow and his boots toed off in the middle of the floor. He looked  _ wrecked.  _ He had deep shadows under his eyes, his face was pale, and every so often she could see him jerk in his sleep. 

When she turned to look back at Alfie, she jolted. His eyes were open, but muzzy. She wondered when he’d last gotten a proper sleep. She wondered what day it was. 

“Lizzie,” he rasped, sliding his hand up her concave belly and over her sternum to cup her cheek. “Hey, Lizbet.”

“Hi,” Lizzie whispered. 

Like dawn (like peace) a smile grew on Alfie’s face. “I’m so happy to see those pretty eyes,” he said, slowly swiping his thumb over her cheekbone.

“I’m happy to see you,” said Lizzie. 

Alfie pushed himself up in the bed and rolled his shoulders, and Lizzie wished he would have stayed with her a little longer. 

“What can I get you?” he asked. “Beef broth? Bread?” 

Lizzie swallowed. She wasn’t thirsty, and the idea of food made her stomach lurch. “Water,” she said quietly. 

“Alright princess,” said Alfie, leaning over to press a kiss to her forehead before rolling off the bed. His shirt was untucked, his trousers hung low on his hips, and his scruff had made it past “unshaved” and into “short beard” territory. 

As Alfie passed Tommy he kicked the bottom of his foot. “Wake up,” he said, rolling his neck with a pop. “Our girl’s awake, mate.”

Tommy woke all at once, alert and aware. His eyes went straight to Lizzie’s, and when they locked eyes… what happened? Expression flickered across Tommy’s face too quickly for Lizzie to track. Relief, maybe. Whatever it was, he locked it down before her tired mind could process it. 

He padded over to the bed and sat on the edge of it, canting his hips away and leaning over Lizzie, those ice-pale eyes bright and focused on hers. 

Lizzie felt shy. “Hi,” she said, glancing towards the window. 

“You had us worried,” said Tommy, tipping her face back to his. 

She remembered him holding her in the bath. She remembered the way he would methodically wash her sweaty hair, and cup his palm over her forehead to keep from getting soap in her eyes. All those soft touches, and all those words that he’d poured out to her in a kind of living, winding prayer. 

Lizzie could ask how he’d found her, or what the day was. She  _ should  _ ask him what would happen next; when she would be dropped back at the hospital to return to work while he drove back up to Birmingham. 

Instead she said, “I’m sorry,” and reached for his hand. 

“Don’t fucking apologize.” 

“Thank you for staying.”

Tommy looked pained. 

“Like I could get him out of here, the gypsy squatter,” said Alfie, walking back in with a glass of water and a heavy earthenware mug that was steaming gently. 

“I had to force him to go see his filthy papist family for Christmas,” said Alfie, rounding the bed to Lizzie’s other side. 

“What day is it?” asked Lizzie as Tommy hauled her into a sitting position and rearranged a mountain of pillows behind her. 

“The 29th of December, love,” said Alfie, passing her the water and then wrapping his big hand over hers.

She felt so weak, so pathetically weak, and already the attention of her men had gone from warming to cloying. She’d been taking care of herself just fine for the past few years, and it was embarrassing to be so utterly helpless now. 

She slowly swallowed a mouthful of water before taking another, feeling the cold slip down her throat and under her breastbone. 

“Good,” said Alfie, turning to face her with a spoon in one hand and the steaming mug in the other. “Now some broth.”

“No, thank you,” said Lizzie turning her face to Tommy. 

He gave her a soft look, but didn’t interfere. “You need your next dose of aspirin. The nurse told us not to give it to you on an empty stomach. It’s what’s keeping your fever down.”

“I don’t want food.” The smell of the beef broth was turning her stomach, and her fingers were shaking where she’d tightened them around the sheets. 

“You’ll feel worse if you don’t take the tablets,” said Tommy. 

Alfie scooped up a spoonful of deep brown beef tea before holding it out to Lizzie. “C’mon, then. Two against one.”

“Fine,” said Lizzie, trying to breathe through her mouth as she swallowed the beef tea. The smell may have turned her stomach, but  _ oh—  _ it was salty and thin and warm and she wanted more of it. 

“Give me the spoon.”

“But—” 

“You can hold the mug,” said Lizzie quietly, refusing to look at either of them as her hands continued to shake. 

They didn’t say anything, just fell into the same ease with each other that they’d had since Lizzie had met them back in France. It was like they could anticipate each other’s next move, and as Lizzie drifted off she watched them through slitted eyes. 

“Fuck,” Tommy mumbled, sitting on the foot of the bed and holding his head in his hands. 

“She’s better. She’s resting. I ought to tuck you right in next to her,” said Alfie, standing between Tommy’s opening knees and running his fingers through Tommy’s short hair. 

“Yeah? You’ve been just as strung out as I have.”

“I slept, mate. One of us had to have some sense.”

“I need to call the family. Let Pol know she’s alright.”

“New Years in a couple days. Have ‘em come down.”

Tommy huffed a quiet laugh and pressed his face into Alfie’s belly. “And tell ‘em what?”

“The truth.”

“Arthur and John already know.”

“Even better then, dearest. They’ll shrug it off and pour drinks for the ladies.”

“Polly probably knows too,” said Tommy darkly. “I leave for four years and come back to find she’s a witch.”

“I have got to meet this fucking woman,” said Alfie, pressing a kiss to the top of Tommy’s head. “Run along, give ‘em a call, and tell them to come down. I’ll stay with Lizbet and then call around, send one of the lads out for food.”

“I’m so fucking relieved,” said Tommy, standing up, cupping Alfie’s face, and kissing him square on the mouth. 

“I know,” said Alfie, patting Tommy on the shoulder before giving him a nudge towards the door. “Run along, there’s a good boy.”

Tommy went, and Alfie stood quietly watching her as Tommy’s footfalls faded down the hall. 

“Did you enjoy that little show, princess?” he asked, climbing back on the bed and pressing himself against her. 

Lizzie made a sleepy little noise and nodded, trying to stir herself over onto her side. She was tired of sleeping on her back. Her spine ached, and every night that had found her well enough to crawl into her own bed had found her falling to sleep curled in her usual ball. 

Alfie helped her get arranged and then spooned his big body around hers, warm and solid and so very, very safe. 

“Naught Lizbet, watching Tommy worry over her like that.”

He carded his fingers through her hair before sliding his hand down her side to stroke the bare skin of her hip. “Did you like watching us, hmm?” 

Lizzie nodded before catching his hand and pulling his arm over her, cradling his forearm to her chest like a favorite blanket. 

“Then you need to stop making a fuss about your lovely beef tea so you can get all well and strong again,” he said, his breath making the hair on the back of her neck flutter. “And then Tommy and me, we can get you a nice chair to set at the end of this bed. A throne for my princess, how about that. And you can sit there and watch me as I take bad Tommy Shelby all apart, just like those motorcars he’s so mad about. Would you like that?” 

“Yes,” Lizzie whispered. 

“Then go to sleep,” said Alfie. 

Lizzie did. With his heat at her back, with the sun spilling over the bed, and with a smile on her face, Lizzie fell asleep. 

Show me the three so closely bound  
As we, by the wet bond of blood,  
By friendship, blossoming from the mud,  
By Death: we faced him, and we found  
Beauty in Death,  
In dead men's breath.  
\--Excerpt from _Two Fusiliers_ , Robert Graves

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello also I love you!
> 
> Note: I know during the 1918 pandemic masks were mandatory in parts of the US. I couldn’t find any primary sources about the UK, but since Europe as a whole is smarter than us, I assume they did it first and also better. (Someone please mail-order-bride me to the EU I promise I’m great.)
> 
> Note 2: The timing of having a bath installed in a middle-class flat in London right around WWI was sketchy. It could have happened if Alfie was wealthy (yes) and fussy (no), but it was just as likely to have not happened until some unknown period later. Since I didn’t want to deal with them heating water and folding Lizzie into a slipper tub, I decided Alfie has a proper bath because this is fiction and I can.


	7. Epilogue

**Wee hours of the morning, 1 January, 1919**

**London, England.**

Lizzie lay between her lovers in Alfie’s big bed and watched as the low-burning fire cast dancing red shadows over the ceiling. The house slumbered around her as the last dregs of 1918 burned away. Polly and Ada had taken the guest room, propelled up the stairs by champagne bubbles and laughter. 

John and Arthur and Finn were all lined up in a row on the living room floor, neat little soldiers in a line, with blankets draped over their bodies and their soft peaked caps over their faces. They were used to sleeping where they could, weren’t they? They all were.

It was amazing what people could get used to, wasn’t it? 

Back in the war she’d gotten so accustomed to the smells, to the dread, to the sleeplessness, to the  _ noise.  _ It had become the background of her existence, the baseline by with everything else was judged. 

Her life was the war, just as it had been for these men, and now it was over. It was over, and a new year had started. 1919 would be the year unsullied by wars. 

It wouldn’t be easy. It would be a long year of firsts for so many people: the first spring without a husband, the first birthday without a father, the first year without a leg or eyes or hope. But it would be a year of firsts, and then more years would follow, and Lizzie hoped there would be so many years of warlessness that it could be forgotten entirely. 

It was also amazing what  _ she  _ could get used to. 

To the smell of the three of them on the sheets of the bed: Alfie’s pipe, Tommy’s cigarettes, her soap. Home smells, body smells, safe and familiar. She could get used to waking with someone’s hands on her, anywhere and everywhere, firm and soothing and known. She was hers just as much as she was theirs. 

She could get used to laughing. To having nightmares and soothing away the terrors of others. To hot tea in the morning, and warm baths at night. 

She could get used to wanting, and being wanted. 

But most of all, Lizzie could get used to being loved. To loving and receiving it in turn, an endless loop of affection and knowing and acceptance. 

And so on this cold winter’s night, when all eyes turned to the future, Lizzie didn’t worry about what was to come. For the first time in her adult life, she knew that whatever it was that happened next, the three of them would face it together. 

#  **The End.**

I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.   
Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.  
\--F. Scott Fitzgerald, _ Tender is the Night _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We did it!
> 
> Thank you so much for taking a chance on this absolutely bonkers crackship of an OT3. I love Alfie and Tommy and Lizzie together, and it just tickles me to death that you guys do too.


End file.
